History of Economic Analysis part 8. At the time of his death in 1950, Joseph Schumpeter-one of the major figures in economics during the first half of the 20th century-was working on his monumental History of Economic Analysis. A complete history of humankind's theoretical efforts to understand economic phenomena from ancient Greece to the present, this book is an important contribution to the history of ideas as well as to economics. | History of economic analysis 32 been done sometimes that any such concepts or relations can be formulated at all. In particular it is not necessary that the concepts we use in the study of social groups should be familiar to the members of these groups themselves the fact if it be a fact that the concept of income was not familiar to the people of the Middle Ages before the fourteenth century is no reason for not using it in an analysis of their But it is true that economic laws are much less stable than are the laws of any physical science that they work out differently in different institutional conditions and that neglect of this fact has been responsible for many an aberration. It is also true that whenever we attempt to interpret human attitudes especially attitudes of people far removed from us in time or culture we risk misunderstanding them not only if we crudely substitute our own attitudes for theirs but also if we do our best to penetrate into the working of their minds. All this is made much worse than it would be otherwise by the fact that the analyzing observer himself is the product of a given social environment and of his particular location in this environment that conditions him to see certain things rather than others and to see them in a certain light. And even this is not all environmental factors may even endow the observer with a subconscious craving to see things in a certain light. This brings us up to the problem of ideological bias in economic analysis. Modern psychology and psychotherapy have made us familiar with a habit of our minds that we call This habit consists in comforting our- selves and impressing others by drawing a picture of ourselves our motives our friends our enemies our vocation our church our country which may have more to do with what we like them to be than with what they are. The competitor who is more successful than we are ourselves is likely to owe his success to tricks that we despise.
