Survey of Agriculture Economics Literature: Quantitative Methods in Agricultural Economics, 1940s to 1970s

In the evolution of modern economics from nineteenth-century political economy many have expressed the ideas that "(1) mathematics, however useful it may have proved in the physical sciences, can play no essential role in the development of the social sciences because the phenomena studied are somehow different—'human beings are not amenable to mathematical law' —and (2) the judgment and intuition of the skilled investigator are fundamentally more useful in the social sciences than mathematical formulas based on quantitative observation" (Arrow [1951]). In a letter in 1906 Alfred Marshall advised A. L. Bowley to "use mathematics as a shorthand language rather than as an engine of inquiry."