Although Robbins’s point is, within the framework of economics, theoretically sound, the fact that the use of increasing productivity in industrial economies over the course of the twentieth century has been so skewed in the direction of increasing income, as opposed to free time, is nonetheless quite puzzling. It seems odd that the demand for free time, under conditions of increasing afluence, should have become so inelastic.
- Conversely, if income drops, the relative value of leisure should also decline, leading to increased efort on the part of workers.
- Abduction refers to the logic involved in the generation of hypotheses, as well as to how explanations are justified. The concept has roots in the philosophy of science of Charles Sander Pierce. For Peirce, abduction was one part of what he described as a “logical triad” in scientific method, the other two being deduction and induction. Abduction generates a hypothesis, and deduction derives some testable logical entailment from the hypothesis, which is then inductively tested through experimentation. Abduction, deduction, and induction thus make up the three phases of the process of scientific investigation. While philosophers of science have generally agreed on the importance of deduction and induction, and have put much efort into their explication, less attention has been given to how hypotheses are generated.
Peirce (1931) held that “all the ideas of science come to it by the way of Abduction” (p. 5:145). By contrast, the other two phases of scientific reasoning, deduction and induction, while being crucial parts of scientific method, are unable to produce new knowledge. On Peirce’s account, the urge to make a theory begins when we encounter a state of afairs that surprises us. We theorize by thinking about what would have to be true of the world in order for the surprising state of afairs to follow as a matter of course—coming up with a hypothesis which, if true, would remove the grounds for our surprise at the world being thus and so. The form of inference in abduction, according to Peirce (1931), is:
The surprising fact, C, is observed;
But if A were true, C would be a matter of course,
Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true. (p. 5:189)
How exactly to cash this out when there are a number of possible candidates for A is not entirely clear, as philosophers have observed (Frankfurt 1958; Achinstein 1970, 1971, 1987). However, broadly put, the procedure is to compare members of a set of plausible candidates for A and pick the one that seems least problematic. This is the strategy I follow in Chapters 3 and 4, where I examine other possible explanations for the pattern of work time and consumption and then show how the theory I develop has advantages over those other explanations.
c h a pt e r 2 : t h e pu z z l e
- According to the classical doctrine posited in Say’s law, supply must be met with an equivalent volume of efective demand. The argument is that since producers must pay for production, they create the purchasing power required for their goods to be sold. Keynes pointed out in The General Theory that while Say’s law might hold in the long run, the fact that money mediates exchange under capitalism means that there is potential for liquidity to become trapped (as a result of money hoarding), leading to short-turn deficits of efective demand, which can in turn lead to a vicious recessive cycle.
Notes to Pages 6–14
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