Richard Stone - Role of Measurement in Economics (1951)

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We usually find a considerable degree of correlation between indicators and also between different sets of weights that we should ever think of using. Consequently we are likely to find that alternative index numbers using different weights show similar and often approximately proportionate movements. That this is so in most economic applications is due to the nature of the actual world and not simply to the formal characteristics of index number techniques.

Richard Stone
The usefulness of observation and measurement in testing economic theories arises because the theorems of economics are supposed to relate to the actual world... Any economic theorem rigorously deduced from given postulates may be regarded as a hypothesis about the actual world which xperience may show to be false.

Richard Stone
There is no hope, as far as I can see, of pushing the postulates of economic theory back to a set of irreducible axioms.

Richard Stone
I have tried to make clear in this brief sketch of the nature of deductively formulated theories, at least as they occur in economics, that, although their origin lies in common observation and introspection, nevertheless they are capable of a purely mathematical development through the exact statement of a of a set of postulates which, however, since they must inevitably contain assumptions about human behaviour, require to be tested by reference to actual events.

Richard Stone