There are at least three reasons why industrialization and the family is today an important subject for debate by an international conference of social workers. The first is an obvious one: the opportunities that it offers for discussion and analysis on a comparative basis. The second lies in the fact that the world is increasingly an industrial world and dominated in its values and goals by problems of economic growth. Compared, for example, with the situation only fifty years ago, far more societies — in Asia, Africa, eastern and southern Europe, and Central and South America — are seized with the possibilities and potentialities of economic growth. To these peoples, economic growth spells a higher material standard of life, a release from the age-old passivity of agrarian poverty. Industrialization, as a means of raising the level of living, is thus something to be desired. This, I believe, is one of the most important facts in the contemporary social scene when looked at in international terms: the fact that a substantial part of mankind, compared with only an insignificant fraction at the beginning of this century, is aware or is becoming aware of the benefits of industrialization. In wanting to be industrialized, in thus wanting, as societies, to be radically changed, groups are, in this process of making community aspirations more explicit, becoming more aware of the gulf between what is and what might be in their conditions of life.

This self-consciousness about material standards is clearly expressed in the United Nations Preliminary Report on the World Social Situation and in much of the work of the international organizations. We seem to have passed into an age of more explicit discontents and of more articulate expectations. Inequalities between nations are now being considered in much the same way as inequalities within nations and between social groups. Changes in relative standards are being recognized and measured; the United Nations report points out, for example, that wealthy nations are growing relatively wealthier while poor nations are becoming relatively poorer. The deduction that more people are making from the dissemination of such ideas is that industrial and technological change will provide all the answers to the problems of poverty.