The Eminence of Professor Galbraith

Economics can only succeed as an empirical science. Economists have to make use of theories. But they should do so with a cautious resolve not to carry them beyond their proper limits, and persistently checking them against observed facts.

It was not an accident that economics should have originated in eighteenth-century Britain — even then a country with worldwide trading interests. But a more fundamental reason was the cautious empiricism of the British mind, in strong contrast with the love of system and theory of most Europeans.