Orthodox biologists are like orthodox economists. When confronted by tensions between their paradigms and reality, they work to explain away the aber… - Paul Samuelson

I was lucky to enter economics in 1932. Analytical economics was poised for its take-off. I faced a lovely vacuum that young economists today can hardly imagine. So much remained to be done. Everything was still in an imperfect state. It was like fishing in a virgin lake: a whopper at every cast, but so many lovely new specimens that the palate never cloyed.

Dynamic process analysis also liberates economists from the necessity of having separate theories of the “turning-points” in addition to theories of cumulative upward and downward swings. Even a simple theory of inventory cycles, or acceleration-multipliers, can explain all four phases of an idealized cycle.
At its best, dynamic analysis can enrich our understanding of possibilities without leading to credulity in new, over-narrow, monistic dogmas concerning the cyclical process.

An evolving discipline–whether it be history or economics or astrophysics or immunology–is ever dynamically changing. Two steps forward and X steps back, so to speak. Periodically, the scholarly group registers more or less self-confidence, self-esteem, and complacency. We careerists are happiest when recent past achievements have seemed to be successful, but when still there are completable tasks dimly visible ahead.