Your Royal Society rightly commemorates the successes of the natural sciences. Many of these successes have been achieved because the problems of physics often involve objects large enough to be studied individually – the motion of the earth, for example. Or components small enough to be subject to statistical regularities – we can never predict the behaviour of an individual molecule or electron, but there are so many molecules and electrons that for most purposes it does not matter. Many of the phenomena we deal with in economics and business fall in between – the units of analysis are individualistic but also too numerous for their idiosyncrasies to be individually understood.
皇家學會(Royal Society)恰如其分的代表著自然科學的成就。許多成就之所以能夠取得，是因為物理學問題所涉及的對象往往大到足以對其進行個體研究，例如地球的運動；或者這個對象的成分小到足以受統計學規律的支配——我們永遠無法預測單個分子或電子的行為，但組成這個對象的分子和電子是如此之多，以至于對大多數課題而言，單個分子或電子的行為并不重要。而我們所研究的許多經濟學和商學現象正好介于兩者之間——分析的單位是個體的，但其數目過多，以至于無法理解每一個個體的特性。