Science & Tech Quote by Nassau William Senior

Senior is doing something economists still do when the math gets messy: he’s lowering the audience’s expectations while sharpening the discipline’s self-image. The sentence begins with an implied concession to empiricism - “these facts” are there, presumably accumulating in ledgers, prices, wages, and trade flows. Then comes the pivot: the real bottleneck isn’t data scarcity but inference. Not observation, but reasoning. By insisting that “drawing... correct conclusions” is “a matter of great difficulty,” Senior frames economics as an arena where error is not a moral failing but a structural risk.

The subtext is protective and aspirational at once. Protective, because it inoculates the field against the charge of underperformance: if the science remains “imperfect” after being “so long and so intensely studied,” that imperfection becomes evidence of complexity rather than incompetence. Aspirational, because it implicitly claims economics as a genuine science - one measured not by quick, comforting answers but by the hard problem of converting social facts into stable knowledge.

Context matters: early-to-mid 19th century political economy was trying to professionalize itself amid industrial upheaval and contentious policy fights over poor relief, factory regulation, and free trade. Senior’s own role as an adviser and public intellectual meant he was writing in the shadow of real consequences. The sentence’s long, careful architecture performs the very difficulty it describes, turning caution into authority: trust us, he suggests, not because we’re finished, but because we’re disciplined enough to admit we aren’t.