throughout economic history until new insights now summarized as the marginalist revolution began in 1871. The marginalists, mentioned in the forward, swapped the telescope for the microscope. They left aside the grand teleologies of Smith and Ricardo and Mill and Marx to refocus on the mechanics of choice. Reasons for tastes or choices were treated as irrelevant. By 1900 or so, the marginalists had given us microeconomics much as we know it today. A century would pass before
bioeconomics took form in response to Hamilton’s rule.
Summary
That gives the outline. It is a layman’s view of what a proper economist might not have attempted. Fools rush in. I will cite sources in economics and biology not to pretend that I am an authority, but to give real ones a chance to check. My case rests on the charts and tables. Mill might have been astonished to find that the kind of
growth he described is the only kind to appear in the record.
What makes my book different, aside from my lack of credentials, is the surprises and the unusual degree of abstraction leading to them. Not many writers try to follow a chain of inference as far without the comforting touch of the stone and wood and rope. If Becker had been as venturesome, he might well have solved the age-wage problem in 1964. I see no other path. Economics is all inside. It is tastes expressed in choices. Capital is foreseen satisfactions discounted by whatever our taste for impatience is. Most of it is human capital leaving little market record
beyond its rental cost in pay. Logic is about all we have left.
But the story cannot end in thin air. Few would pay the nuisance cost of so much abstraction without prospect of surprising and testable prediction. I will try to deliver that. Mill’s idea is a surprise to politicians, if less so to economists, and could hardly be tested more thoroughly and successfully. When new ideas are thought up, Mother Nature says “Shazam” and embodies them at no cost beyond the depreciation plowback we needed anyway. The data could not be more supportive if
Mill and I had invented them. Even my proposed solution to the age-wage problem,
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