So, sandwiched in between all the visits and interviews over the Book, were many excursions about locating new men for the University of Washington.  I like to think of what the three Pennsylvania men he wanted had to say about him.  Seattle seemed very far away to them—­they were doubtful, very.  Then they heard the talk before the Conference referred to above, and every one of the three accepted his call.  As one of them expressed it to his wife later:  “I’d go anywhere for that man.”  Between that Seattle call and his death there were eight universities, some of them the biggest in the country, which wished Carl Parker to be on their faculties.  One smaller university held out the presidency to him.  Besides this, there were nine jobs outside of University work that were offered him, from managing a large mine to doing research work in Europe.  He had come into his own.

It was just before we left Berkeley that the University of California asked Carl to deliver an address, explaining his approach to economics.  It was, no doubt, the most difficult talk he ever gave.  There under his very nose sat his former colleagues, his fellow members in the Economics Department, and he had to stand up in public and tell them just how inadequate he felt most of their teaching to be.  The head of the Department came in a trifle late and left immediately after the lecture.  He could hardly have been expected to include himself in the group who gathered later around Carl to express their interest in his stand.  I shall quote a bit from this paper to show Carl’s ideas on orthodox economics.

“This brings one to perhaps the most costly 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.