It is a poor species of human being which this grim vision conjures up before our eyes: “fragmentary and disintegrated” man, the end product of growi… - Wilhelm Röpke

It is impossible indeed not to look with considerable uneasiness at the type of the "modern economist" as he developed after Keynes' revolutionary book, whom Keynes himself regarded with alarm at the end of his days. It is the type of man who is obsessed by one thing, i.e. "effective demand," which he thinks must be kept up at whatever cost, while he forgets the working of the mechanism of prices, wages, interest and exchange rates.

All these peculiarities of the structure of modern tyranny, whose ugliest and extremest form was Nazism, are marked by the entire dissolution of the values and standards without which our society, or any other, cannot exist in the long run: a pernicious anaemia of morality, a cynical unconcern in the choice of means, which in the absence of firm principles become ends in themselves; a nihilistic lack of principle, and, in a word, what may be described literally as Satanism and Nihilism. Everything rots away, and finally there remains only one fixed aim of the tyranny, to which all moral principles, all promises, treaties, guarantees, and ideologies are ruthlessly sacrificed—the naked lust for domination, for the preservation of the continually threatened power, a power held on to for no other purpose than the continued enjoyment of all its fruits. […] All the ideals and emotions blatantly appealed to—social justice, national community, peace, religion, family life, welfare of the masses, claims in the international field, the return to simpler and more natural forms of life, and so forth—prove as a rule to be nothing more than crudely-painted inter-changeable boards for the staging of mass propaganda.

In Economics as almost everywhere else, with all our cleverness, we have become decidedly less wise, while knowing more and more about less and less. We have lost the sense of proportion—so indispensable for every economist—while analysing the curiosities of hypothetical economic situations and forgetting what has a bearing on real economic life. In spinning out the fine threads of the New Economics, we forget the most elementary principles of economics, and while stressing what might at best in highly exceptional circumstances we overlook what are almost perennial truths. While proudly parading our elaborate equations we unlearnt that simple common sense which consists in reckoning with human reactions and institutions as they really are.