ABSTRACT
The case of Japan makes it clear that natural resources are no longer necessary for high productivity. The considerable minority of Americans who are still poor have tended to drop out of the political and cultural spotlight. The changes in the relationship between work and leisure have been influential in the growth of suburbs and the migration of more and more middle- and even working-class people out of the central city. “The Search for Challenge,” written before the Peace Corps, proposes something like it: a civilian corps analogous to the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression. The essay that gives this book its tide was originally written as a contribution to a symposium, mostly of economists, in which the Committee for Economic Development asked individuals to discuss what they regarded as the major problems of economic development in the United States in the years ahead.
