Adam Smith and the Concept of the Feedback System: Economic Thought and Technology in 18th-Century Britain
1971; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3102276
ISSN1097-3729
Autores Tópico(s)Economic Theory and Policy
ResumoTo the present-day economic theoretician, the concept of the feedback system is a familiar intellectual tool, and he is conscious that this concept is also used in a number of scientific disciplines. Yet awareness of this interdisciplinary application is relatively recent. An early witness was H. R. Hall, who, after describing Watt's invention of the centrifugal governor in his 1903 engineering text, added that Watt thus brought into mechanical science a very beautiful application of the law of supply and demand.' Similarly, in 1909 the French economist Albert Aftalion (1874-1956) explained the cyclic fluctuations of economic systems by the model of the feedback loop of a manually regulated furnace.2 In the mathematical analysis of economic dynamics, the concept of the closed loop was first employed in the early 1930s by pioneers of econometrics, such as Ragnar Frisch and Michal Kalecki.3 More generally the methods of systems engineering were introduced into economic theory in the late 1940s.4 This process culminated in Arnold Tustin's 1953 book, The Mechanism of Economic Systems, in which he showed in full detail how problems of economic stability and prediction could
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