The most important economic problem in any age is to know what we want, to define useful and worthy ends, and to balance our efforts among them in due proportion. In social affairs, even more than in private life, however, the conceptions of one era tend to persist into another, when circumstances have changed, and so to provide false guides for social policy. In the United States, the dominant purpose of economic policy has been, and still is, to foster economic growth; that is, to maximize the pace at which we enlarge our capacity to produce goods and services. But multiplication of goods and services no longer promises the large rewards it used to do. My purpose is to urge the need for reconsidering the high priority we assign to this objective and so for striking a new balance among the goals towards which our economic life is, in a broad sense, directed.

The achievements of economic growth in the last century

During the last one hundred years the output of this country per head of population approximately quintupled. This in itself, however, is not the measure of our economic success. Our success lies rather in the fact that economic growth was made to serve a number of purposes of first-rate importance.

The most significant was that a very large portion of our population, then living below or near poverty levels and under intense economic pressure, was lifted above the poverty line and placed in comfortable circumstances.