“The fair answer seems this:  We economists speculate little on human motives.  We are not curious about the great basis of fact which dynamic and behavioristic psychology has gathered to illustrate the instinct stimulus to human activity.  Most of us are not interested to think of what a psychologically full or satisfying life is.  We are not curious to know that a great school of behavior analysis called the Freudian has been built around the analysis of the energy outbursts brought by society’s balking of the native human instincts.  Our economic literature shows that we are but rarely curious to know whether industrialism is suited to man’s inherited nature, or what man in turn will do to our rules of economic conduct in case these rules are repressive.  The motives to economic activity which have done the major service in orthodox economic texts and teachings have been either the vague middle-class virtues of thrift, justice, and solvency, or the equally vague moral sentiments of ‘striving for the welfare of others,’ ’desire for the larger self,’ ‘desire to equip one’s self well,’ or, lastly, the labor-saving deduction that man is stimulated in all things economic by his desire to satisfy his wants with the smallest possible effort.  All this gentle parody in motive theorizing continued contemporaneously with the output of the rich literature of social and behavioristic psychology which was almost entirely addressed to this very problem of human motives in modern economic society.  Noteworthy exceptions are the remarkable series of books by Veblen, the articles and criticisms of Mitchell and Patten, and the most significant small book by Taussig, entitled ‘Inventors and Money-makers.’  It is this complementary field of psychology to which the economists must turn, as these writers have turned, for a vitalization of their basic hypotheses.  There awaits them a bewildering array of studies of the motives, emotions, and folkways of our pecuniary civilization.  Generalizations and experiment statistics abound, ready-made for any structure of economic criticism.  The human motives are isolated, described, compared.  Business confidence, the release of work-energy, advertising appeal, market vagaries, the basis of value computations, decay of workmanship, the labor unrest, decline in the thrift habit, are the subjects treated.

“All human activity is untiringly actuated by the demand for realization of the instinct wants.  If an artificially limited field of human endeavor be called economic life, all its so-called motives hark directly back to the human instincts for their origin. There are, in truth, no economic motives as such. The motives of economic life are the same as those of the life of art, of vanity and ostentation, of war and crime, of sex.  Economic life is merely the life in which instinct gratification is alleged to take on a rational pecuniary habit form.  Man is not less a father, with a father’s parental instinct, just because he passes down the street from