The aims of this Journal, and of the Society of which it is to be the organ, have been stated above by the Editor with that brevity and precision which are characteristic of every statement of a sound case. What I have to add, by way of comment and amplification, will, I hope, confirm the impression that there is nothing startling or paradoxical about our venture, but that it grows naturally out of the present situation of our science. We do not wish to revive controversies about general questions of ‘method’, but simply to present and discuss the results of our work. We do not impose any credo – scientific or otherwise – and we have no common credo beyond holding: first, that economics is a science, and, secondly, that this science has one very important quantitative aspect. We are no sect. Nor are we a ‘school’. For all possible differences of opinion on individual problems, which can at all exist among economists, do, and I hope always will, exist among us.

Like everything else, economic life may be looked at from a great, strictly speaking an infinite, number of standpoints. Only some of these belong to the realm of science, still fewer admit of, or require, the use of quantitative methods. Many non-quantitative aspects are, and always have been, more interesting to most minds. Fruitful work can be done on entirely non-quantitative lines. Much of what we want to know about economic phenomena can be discovered and stated without any technical, let alone mathematical, refinements upon ordinary modes of thought, and without elaborate treatment of statistical figures.