Alfred Marshall, Allyn Young, and the Method of Economics

While Marshall’s views on the method of economics are familiar, Allyn Young’s views on the subject have escaped attention in the literature. This article, by situating Young’s ideas in comparison with Marshall’s, tries to fill an important lacuna in the literature. Both admired classical political economy and the German historical school. Both, in some ways, felt that it was not the concrete truths but the engine for the discovery of concrete truths that was more important. While both had broadly similar views on the method, Young was an original thinker in his own right. Particularly, he rejected Marshall’s partial equilibrium approach in favor of a disequilibrium approach to economics. He felt that Marshall’s supply-demand curves hold ceteris paribus and cannot be integrated to give a good social picture. He viewed the economic phenomenon in its togetherness, but this togetherness did not lead to equilibrium but disequilibrium. Finally, both were evolutionary economists, and their comparison would be of interest to an institutional journal.