What sort of science is it that must, for the sake of is predictive success, hope and pray that people will never be their better selves, but always be greedy social idiots with nothing finer to do than getting and spending, getting and spending?

We need a nobler economics that is not afraid to discuss spirit and conscience, moral purpose and the meaning of life, and economics that aims to educate an elevate people, not merely to measure their low-grade behavior…..

Economic progress is obtainable only if we employ those powerful human drives of selfishness, which religion and traditional wisdom universally call upon us to resist. The modern economy is propelled by a frenzy of greed and indulges in an orgy of envy, and these are not accidental features but the very causes of its expansionist success.

If human vices such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. A man driven by greed or envy loses the power of seeing things as they already are, of seeing things in their roundness and wholeness, and his very successes become failures. If wholeness, and his very successes become failures. IF whole societies become infected by these vices, they may indeed achieve astonishing things but they become increasingly incapable of solving the most elementary problems of everyday existence. (From the book “Small is Beautiful” by E.F.Schumacher, P 9 & 31)