How Worried Should We Be? The Anxious Euphoria of the Business Press

In 1908, in Paris, Emile Durkheim and Charles Mathieu Limousin debated which was the supreme social science: economics or sociology? In the course of the debate, Durkheim challenged the immutability of economic laws. “The value of things,” he said, “in fact depends not only upon their objective properties, but also upon the opinion one forms of them.” He lost. The reporter in the Bulletin de la société d’économie politique summed up the debate this way: “Political econom...