 | University of Virginia |  |
ECONOMICS.
In its value both as a mental discipline to the student, and as a subject of practical
interest to the citizen, it is difficult to over-estimate the importance of this
science.
As a mental discipline the study of Economics combines to a certain extent
the advantages of linguistic, mathematical and historical training. One of the
most serious difficulties of the subject is the fact that many of its technical terms
are also used in loose popular significations; and a close study of Economics
teaches a man to be very careful in the exact and discriminating use of words.
The rigid reasoning, too, by which economic laws are deductively derived from a
few simple and fundamental facts in human and physical nature is as relentlessly
logical as that by which the properties of triangles or circles are deduced from
the axioms of Geometry. And, finally, the historical investigation of economic
phenomena with a view to the verification, modification or refutation of the laws
deductively ascertained, or to the inductive discovery of other laws, is attended
with the advantages of other historical study, as above set forth, and sheds a flood
of light upon many questions in social, political, or even religious history.
B. A. COURSE.
Like Mathematics, Economics is treated as Pure and Applied. In the first
term of the session the whole field of Pure or Deductive Economics, an abstract
science which deliberately and properly ignores, for the sake of clearness and
simplicity, many important phases of social life, is traversed in outline; and a
few brief practical applications are made to special topics. In the second term a
thorough deductive, as well as inductive and historical, investigation of the
principles of Money and Credit is undertaken; while a few lectures are devoted
to the consideration of protective tariffs. The third term is devoted to a discussion
of the periodical commercial panics and crises of the nineteenth century, and
to the history of the vast changes in production, transportation and industrial
organization that have taken place throughout the world in recent years.
Text-Books.—Walker's Political Economy, (Advanced Course); Horace White's
Money and Banking; selected pamphlets from the Sound Currency series published
by the N. Y. Reform Club, viz: Nipher's The Appreciation of Gold, Warner's The
Currency Famine of 1893, Watkins's Cotton and the Currency, White's Coin's Financial
Fool, and the Report of the Monetary Commission of the Indianapolis Convention
of 1897; Philpott's Tariff Chats; Porter Sherman's Tariff Primer; Hyndman's
Commercial Crises of the Nineteenth Century; Wells's Recent Economic Changes.
| University of Virginia | |