Martha Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. Her most recent book is "Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities."

Cuts in the humanities are bad for business and bad for democracy. Even if a nation’s only goal were economic prosperity, the humanities supply essential ingredients for a healthy business culture.

Why is the U.S. moving away from the humanities just at the time that our rivals are discovering their worth?

Nations such as China and Singapore, which previously ignored the humanities, are now aggressively promoting them, because they have concluded that the cultivation of the imagination through the study of literature, film, and the other arts is essential to fostering creativity and innovation. They also have found that teaching critical thinking and argumentation (a skill associated with courses in philosophy) is essential in order to foster healthy debate inside a business world that might too easily become complacent or corrupt.

We in the U.S. are moving away from the humanities just at the time that our rivals are discovering their worth. But a healthy business culture is not all that life in America is about.

We also pride ourselves on our open democracy, and on the freedoms of speech and the press that make our political life one in which the people rule. To keep democracy vital, we urgently need the abilities that the humanities foster. First, we need critical thinking: the ability to debate respectfully with others, to tell a good argument from a bad one, to examine tradition and prejudice in a Socratic spirit.

Second, we need history: a knowledge of the world and its many cultures and religions. Knowledge is not a guarantee of good political behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior. In a world full of simple stereotypes, we will only preserve democratic values of debate and mutual respect if we try hard to understand the past and the present.

Finally, we need the imaginative ability to put ourselves in the positions of people different from ourselves, whether by class or race or religion or gender. Democratic politics involves making decisions that affect other people and groups. We can only do this well if we try to imagine what their lives are like and how changes of various sorts affect them. The imagination is an innate gift, but it needs refinement and cultivation; this is what the humanities provide.

“But my child needs a job,” a parent might say.Yes, but preparing for a job and learning the lessons of the humanities are not mutually exclusive. The American system of higher education, unlike almost all other higher education systems in the world — where students enter university to study just a single subject — encourages students to major in one subject, often one related to future work, while taking general education courses in a variety of disciplines.

The future engineer or computer programmer can still learn skills of argument from Plato’s dialogues and gain a deeper grasp of the lives of others through literature and the arts.

If we cut the humanities, our nation will be the loser, both economically and politically.

