In 1932, Lionel Robbins wrote an essay, “An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science”. (The 1935 version is more familiar.) I suspect that essay is rarely read now, though it is still worth a read.
But every entry-level student of economics knows the Robbins definition of Economics. “Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.” Elsewhere in the essay, “The economist studies the disposal of scarce means.
” Precisely. Had means or resources been unlimited, there would have been nothing worth studying. The key to the discipline is opportunity costs of resources and the trade-off.
To use the example made famous by Paul Samuelson, does society spend on guns, or does it spend on butter? Samuelson’s first name reminds me of another famous quote from a George Bernard Shaw book, Everybody’s Political What’s What? , published in 1944. It’s a bit of a cliched quote. “A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
” Shaw said this in the context of inflation, when debtors (with debt fixed in nominal terms) benefit. Clearly, Shaw liked the name. In that book, he alludes to Tsar Paul (Russian Emperor from 1796 to 1801) several times.
But Shaw did not coin the Peter-Paul example. It figures in Kipling’s 1919 poem, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”. “In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, by robbin.