The lamentable
shifting of the employees in all commercial spheres, with its
injurious social consequences, would then be unnecessary, and both
employers and employees would profit. Moreover, like the selection of
the men, the means of securing the most satisfactory work from them,
has also so far been left entirely to common sense. Commercial work
stands under an abundance of varying conditions, and each may have
influences the isolated effects of which are not known, because they
have not been studied in that systematic form which only the
experiment can establish. The popular literature on this whole group
of subjects is extensive, and in its expansion corresponds to the
widespread demand for real information and advice to the salesman. But
hardly any part of the literature in the borderland regions of
economics is so disappointing in its vagueness, emptiness, and
helplessness. Experimental psychology has nothing with which to
replace it to-day, but it can at least show the direction from which
decisive help may be expected in future.
XXIV
THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF ECONOMIC PSYCHOLOGY
Here we may stop. From those elementary questions concerning the
mental effects, the path would quickly lead to questions of gravest
importance. What is the mental effect which the economic labor
produces in the laborer himself? How do economic movements influence
the mind of the community? How far do non-economic factors produce
effects on the psychical mechanism of the economic agents? But it
would be idle to claim to-day for exact psychology, with its methods
of causal thought, regions in which so far popular psychology, with
its methods of purposive thought, is still sovereign.
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