The Economics of Industry Author:Alfred Marshall Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: But the statesman or the financier who decides that these two towns are to be connected by a railway is a man of Art in a yet broader sense of the term. For he h... more »as to consider not only what it will cost to make the railway but also what nett profit it will bring in, and perhaps what will be its indirect political, social and moral effects. In doing this he has to make many inquiries of Economics; for this science examines the laws that determine the growth of trade in particular channels, and the cost of making and working the railway. Economics then cannot by itself be a guide in the practical affairs of life; but it answers a number of difficult questions which must be asked of it by the statesman, the man of business, and the philanthropist. Economics is to be classed with the Moral or Social Sciences ; because it deals only incidentally with inanimate things. Its main purpose is to seek for .the moral and social Laws by which men's conduct is determined in the every day work of their lives: the motives which cause them to seek one trade and occupation rather than another, and which govern their behaviour to others with whom their trade brings them into contact. Economics investigates the causes which determine the work of a man's daily life, the manner in which he spends his income, and the influence which his work exerts on his character. § 3. Social sciences have made slower progress than physical sciences. One reason of this is that men have only recently begun to apply to social sciences those methods of classification, and that systematic study of each class of truths, which have been so successful in the physical sciences. But now that men have set themselves to study each separate group of social facts by itself, these sciences too are beginning to advance steadil...« less