sive. 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 his home to his office. His business raid
into his rival's market has the same naive charm that tickled the heart
of his remote ancestor when in the night he rushed the herds of a
near-by clan. A manufactu