Economic Analysis and Agricultural Policy

Extract

By “agricultural policy” I mean the pattern of those acts of government, especially of national governments, which specifically concern the agricultural segment of society. The discussion of agricultural policy, like that of any other social problem, involves all the social sciences, perhaps one should say all the sciences. Economic analysis, dealing as it does with a limited range of abstractions, cannot pretend to give an “answer” to any social problem, agricultural policy included. Sociological, political, legal, historical, psychological, technical considerations obviously enter into the discussion. Nevertheless it may be useful to ask what are the insights yielded by economic analysis, as a discipline of thought and as a system of related propositions, in approaching a problem of this degree of generality. The case for economics, or for any other discipline of thought, is the case for specialization. The problems involved in the study of even so relatively simple a problem as agricultural policy are beyond the wit of any single mind to explore fully. To appreciate the problems of agriculture fully one would need to be an economist, sociologist, political scientist, social psychologist, biologist, chemist, physicist, botanist, zoologist, and much more; and in these days no one man can hope to be expert in all fields. The only way in which we can even begin to encompass any problem is by specialization; but, according to what is almost the first proposition in economics, specialization is useless without exchange. The aim of this paper is a little intellectual trade, a small offering of an economist to other disciplines, in the hope perhaps of some enlightenment in return.