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 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