ht inspiration to many; and
I seek comfort in the thought that, among the students at the
University, there will be some at least who are eager to carry forward
his work."
There were sessions with Gompers, Meyer Bloomfield, Secretary Baker,
Secretary Daniels, the Shipping Board, and many others.
Then, at Philadelphia, came the most telling single event of our
economic lives--Carl's paper before the Economic Association on "Motives
in Economic Life." At the risk of repeating to some extent the ideas
quoted from previous papers, I shall record here a few statements from
this one, as it gives the last views he held on his field of work.
"Our conventional economics to-day analyzes no phase of industrialism or
the wage-relationship, or citizenship in pecuniary society, in a manner
to offer a key to such distressing and complex problems as this. Human
nature riots to-day through our economic structure, with ridicule and
destruction; and we economists look on helpless and aghast. The menace
of the war does not seem potent to quiet revolt or still class cries.
The anxiety and apprehension of the economist should not be produced by
this cracking of his economic system, but by the poverty of the
criticism of industrialism which his science offers. Why are economists
mute in the presence of a most obvious crisis in our industrial society?
Why have our criticisms of industrialism no sturdy warnings about this
unhappy evolution? Why does an agitated officialdom search to-day in
vain among our writings, for scientific advice touching
labor-inefficiency or industrial disloyalty, for prophecies and plans
about the rise in our industrialism of economic classes unharmonious and
hostile?
"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 repres
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