From David Brooks's column in today's New York Times:

Economics achieved coherence as a science by amputating most of human nature. Now economists are starting with those parts of emotional life that they can count and model (the activities that make them economists). But once theyre in this terrain, theyll surely find that the processes that make up the inner life are not amenable to the methodologies of social science. The moral and social yearnings of fully realized human beings are not reducible to universal laws and cannot be studied like physics.Once this is accepted, economics would again become a subsection of history and moral philosophy.

Matthew Boudway is senior editor of Commonweal.

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