"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 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,—
"Consider the paradox of the rigidity of the university student's scheme of study, and the vagaries and whims of the scholarly emotion. Contemplate the forcing of that most delicate of human attributes, i.e., interest, to bounce forth at the clang of a gong. To illustrate: the student is confidently expected to lose himself in fine contemplation of Plato's philosophy up to eleven o'clock, and then at 11.07, with no important mental cost, to take up a profitable and scholarly investigation into the banking problems of the United States. He will be allowed by the proper academic committee German Composition at one o'clock, diseases of citrus fruit trees at two, and at three he is asked to exhibit a fine sympathy in the Religions and Customs of the Orient. Between 4.07 and five it is calculated that he can with profit indulge in gymnasium recreation, led by an instructor who counts out loud and waves his arms in time to a mechanical piano. Between five and six, this student, led by a yell-leader, applauds football practice. The growing tendency of American university students to spend their evenings in extravagant relaxation, at the moving pictures, or in unconventional dancing, is said to be willful and an indication of an important moral sag of recent years. It would be interesting also to know if Arkwright, Hargreaves, Watt, or Darwin, Edison, Henry Ford, or the Wrights, or other persons of desirable if unconventional mechanical imagination, were encouraged in their scientific meditation by scholastic experiences of this kind. Every American university has a department of education devoted to establishing the most effective methods of imparting knowledge to human beings."
From the same article:—
"The break in the systematization which an irregular and unpredictable thinker brings arouses a persistent if unfocused displeasure. Hence we have the accepted and cultivated institutions, such as our universities, our churches, our clubs, sustaining with care mediocre standards of experimental thought. European critics have long compared the repressed and uninspiring intellect of the American undergraduate with the mobile state of mind of the Russian and German undergraduates which has made their institutions the centre of revolutionary change propaganda. To one who knows in any intimate way the life of the American student, it becomes only an uncomfortable humor to visualize any of his campuses as the origins of social protests. The large industry of American college athletics and its organization-for-victory concept, the tendency to set up an efficient corporation as the proper university model, the extensive and unashamed university advertising, and consequent apprehension of public opinion, the love of size and large registration, that strange psychological abnormality, organized cheering, the curious companionship of state universities and military drill, regular examinations and rigidly prescribed work—all these interesting characteristics are, as is natural in character-formation, both cause and effect. It becomes an easy prophecy within behaviorism to forecast that American universities will continue regular and mediocre in mental activity and reasonably devoid of intellectual bent toward experimental thinking."
Perhaps here is where I may quote a letter Carl received just before leaving Berkeley, and his answer to it. This correspondence brings up several points on which Carl at times received criticism, and I should like to give the two sides, each so typical of the point of view it represents.