More than a century ago, one of the most famous essays ever written in American economics appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics: “Why is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?” There, Thorstein Veblen claimed that economics was too dominated by a mechanistic view to address the problems of economic life. Since the world and the economy had come to be viewed from an evolutionary perspective after Charles Darwin, it was rather straightforward to argue that the increasingly abstract mathematical character of economics was non-evolutionary. However, Veblen had studied with a first-rate intellect, Charles Sanders Peirce, attending his elementary logic class. If Peirce had written about the future of economics in 1898, it would have been very different than Veblen’s essay. Peirce could have written that economics should become an evolutionary mathematical science and that much of classical and neoclassical economics could be interpreted from an evolutionary perspective.

中文翻译：

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为什么经济学是一门进化的数学科学：VEBLEN 的经济学观怎么会与 PEIRCE 的如此不同？

一个多世纪前，美国经济学史上最著名的论文之一出现在经济学季刊：“为什么经济学不是进化科学？” 在那里，Thorstein Veblen 声称经济学过于被机械主义观点所主导，无法解决经济生活中的问题。由于在查尔斯·达尔文之后开始从进化的角度看待世界和经济，因此可以相当直截了当地认为经济学日益抽象的数学特征是非进化的。然而，凡勃伦曾在他的初等逻辑课上师从一流的才智查尔斯·桑德斯·皮尔斯（Charles Sanders Peirce）。如果皮尔士在 1898 年写过关于经济学的未来的文章，那将与凡勃伦的文章大不相同。皮尔斯本可以写道，经济学应该成为一门进化数学科学，并且可以从进化的角度解释大部分古典和新古典经济学。