“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 labor class, bereft of their social norms by the violence of their uprooting from the old world, dropped into an unprepared and chaotic American life, with its insidious prestige—­here a rise in wages could and does often mean added ostentation, social climbing, superficial polishing, new vice.  This social perversion in the consuming of the wage-increase is without the ken of the economist.  He cannot, if he would, think of it, for he has no mental tools, no norms applicable for entrance into the medley of human motives called consumption.

“For these many reasons economic thinking has been weak and futile in the problems of conservation, of haphazard invention, of unrestricted advertising, of anti-social production, of the inadequacy of income, of criminality.  These are problems within the zone of the intimate life of the population.  They are economic problems, and determine efficiencies within the whole economic life.  The divorcing for inspection of the field of production from the rest of the machinery of civilization has brought into practice a false method, and the values arrived at have been unhappily half-truths.  America to-day is a monument to the truth that growth in wealth becomes significant for national welfare only when it is joined with an efficient and social policy in its consumption.

“Economics will only save itself through an alliance with the sciences of human behavior, psychology, and biology, and through a complete emancipation from ‘prosperity mores.’ . . .  The sin of Economics has been the divorce of its work from reality, of announcing an analysis of human activity with the human element left out.”

One other point remained ever a sore spot with Carl, and that was the American university and its accomplishments.  In going over his writings, I find scattered through the manuscripts explosions on the ways, means, and ends, of academic education in our United States.  For instance,—­