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The Role of Numeracy in the History of Economic Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

Ingrid H. Rima
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The popular view among many contemporary economists is that our predecessors were literate but not numerate. Their myopia is curious to those who have the benefit of greater historical perspective. Many early practitioners of political economy can be credited with recognizing that, by their very nature, the problems in which they were interested required them to measure, quantify and enumerate. From the seventeenth century onwards, inquiring minds had already learned to distrust information and ideas that derived from the then traditional qualitative approach to science, which described the sensations associated with objects and events. William Petty's Political Arithmetic is a case in point; it aimed not simply to record and describe reality in terms of

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Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , Fall 1994 , pp. 188 - 201
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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