Though the distance between the sinuous forms of Klimt and Schiele and the dry texts of economists might seem vast, Haberler and his fellow Austrian liberals ­were engaged with something similar. Their questions ­were basic, and at some level also aesthetic: How should we mea­sure the “complicated latticework of individual economic acts,” and how can we represent it visually? What face of economic actions should we pres­ent to the public? Haberler wrote in 1927 that economics was concerned not only with outward actions but also with internal motivations, ­matters of the “psyche” and the “spirit,” or Geist. For this reason, he said, economics was one of the humanities, or Geisteswissenschaften, a “science of the spirit.”

Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, loc. 179