ly delinquency of modern
Economics, and that is its refusal to incorporate into its weighings and
appraisals the facts and hypotheses of modern psychology. Nothing in the
postulates of the science of Economics is as ludicrous as its catalogue
of human wants. Though the practice of ascribing 'faculties' to man has
been passed by psychology into deserved discard, Economics still
maintains, as basic human qualities, a galaxy of vague and rather
spiritual faculties. It matters not that, in the place of the primitive
concepts of man stimulated to activity by a single trucking sense, or a
free and uninfluenced force called a soul, or a 'desire for financial
independence,' psychology has established a human being possessed of
more instincts than any animal, and with a psychical nature whose
activities fall completely within the causal law.

"It would be a great task and a useless one to work through current
economic literature and gather the strange and mystical collection of
human dispositions which economists have named the springs of human
activity. They have no relation to the modern researches into human
behavior of psychology or physiology. They have an interesting relation
only to the moral attributes postulated in current religion.

"But more important and injurious than the caricaturing of wants has
been the disappearance from Economics of any treatment or interest in
human behavior and the evolution of human character in Economic life.
This is explained in large part by the self-divorce of Economics from
the biological field; but also in an important way by the exclusion from
Economics of considerations of consumption.

"Only under the influence of the social and educational psychologists
and behaviorists could child-labor, the hobo, unemployment, poverty, and
criminality be given their just emphasis; and it seems accurate to
ascribe the social sterility of Economic theory and its programme to its
ignorance and lack of interest in modern comparative psychology.

"A deeper knowledge of human instincts would never have allowed
American economists to keep their faith in a simple rise of wages as an
all-cure for labor unrest. In England, with a homogeneous labor class,
active in politics, maintaining university extension courses, spending
their union's income on intricate betterment schemes, and wealthy in
tradition--there a rise in wages meant an increase in welfare. But in
the United States, with a heterogeneous lab