> betcha we wouldn't have any economic problems if we had just
> listened to Whitehead. Damn! What fools we were!
I don't think so.
Whitehead traced the economic problems of the 1930s to the "mentality" then dominant in economics and business, a mentality that, among other things, ignored the social ontological fact of "internal relations".
This diagnosis of the problems was set out in two lectures at the Harvard Business School, "The Study of the Past: Its Uses and Dangers" (reproduced in Essays in Science and Philosophy) and "Foresight" (reproduced as chap. 6 in Adventures of Ideas).
He assigned the task of creating a more "virtuous" (in the sense of Plato) "business mind of the future" to university business schools.
This ignored the fact that the dominant mentality he was attempting to change was, as a psychological matter, not open to being changed in this way. This was true of the mentality dominant in business schools (and economics departments) as well as that dominant in business.
An illustration is provided by the late James Tobin, one of the leading American "Keynesian" economists of the last century.
Tobin was a student in Whitehead's 1937 Harvard undergrad philosophy course. The meticulous notes he took record Whitehead applying his philosophical ideas, including the idea of "internal relations", to a critique of the "classical" form of economics. This included an elaboration of the limits "internal relations" place on deductive axiomatic (including mathematical) reasoning.
Tobin, however, went on to, among other things, reconstruct key aspects of Keynes's economics as exercises in mathematical optimization, i.e. to reconstruct them in a way that ignores their social ontological and psychological foundations.
As Keynes pointed out, listening and reading with understanding themselves require developed "virtue"; they require what Keynes called "good will".
Ted