PKT message, Re: Re. Statistical Method and Economics

I submit that there is not an iota of difference between Mill's concluding remarks and Keynes 1922 definition - in which, perhaps not so incidentally, Keynes repeats the one word in Mill's summary with which one can take exception, "correctly":

"The Theory of Economics does not furnish a body of settled conclusions immediately applicable to a policy. It is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking, which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions."

Addendum.

It occurred to me as I wrote the above that the John Maynard Keynes of 1922 was not conveying his own message on the concept of "the Theory of Economics" - that, instead, his was a copy-cat statement of John Stuart Mill's (and, although this came to light much later, Jeremy Bentham's) lucid concept thereof.

For if Keynes, after thinking it through, had arrived at an independent conclusion on the concept of "the Theory of Economics", then he could not have persuaded himself by the early 1930s that the General Theory - a piece of work that makes believe that "The Theory of Economics" does "furnish a body of settled conclusions immediately applicable to a policy" - was the way to go.

In this respect, it is a matter of record that Dennis Robertson, after working for years with Keynes on monetary theory in the 1920s leading to the Treatise on Money, became intellectually estranged from Keynes as he changed course and, incongruously, sought to emulate Albert Einstein's achievement in theoretical physics by developing a General Theory of real-world economics.

It is also a matter of record that Schumpeter who, after receiving a copy of the Treatise from Keynes, deemed it to represent a "landmark" achievement, was intellectually contemptuous of the General Theory which Keynes developed in cooperation with the Cambridge Circus for whom the Bentham/Mill concept of "the Theory of Economics" was nonsense - because incomprehensible.

That is, incomprehensible to them.

Gunnar