The Ghost in the White House / Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want

by Gerald Stanley Lee

VII

ENGINEERS IN FOLKS

The most gravely important, unbusinesslike and unscientific blunders people make in economics, are their judgments of facts about people. The other facts than the facts about people—about how people feel and are going to feel inside, are comparatively accurate and obtainable. Comparatively ordinary experts, or experts with rather routine training and education can deal with the other facts than the facts about people. The facts about labor, capital and superproduction, that we fail to get most, are the psychological facts about the way people are judging one another.

We have strikes because on one side or the other, or both, people are off on their facts about one another. One of the first things business men are going to generally arrange for is to have these facts about human nature, like all other engineering facts in business, dealt with by experts—by the general recognition and employment of experts in human nature—of human engineers, of natural and trained interpreters of men to one another.

If everybody will begin dealing to-morrow morning with people as they really are, our economics in America will be as simple as a primer, before night.

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VIII

THE GREAT NEW PROFESSION

En Route, New York, New Haven & Hartford R. R.

January 19, 1920.