ABSTRACT
The age of abundance has its grandeurs and miseries which are both like and unlike those of any other age, and the searching of aims and discovery of motives appropriate to our new forms of peril and opportunity, along with the discovery of ways to institutionalize our collective aspirations, seems to me the fundamental economic and meta-economic task. America has been, since Jacksonian times and earlier, a country in which the creditor class, and the creditor-minded, were a minority, and moderately slow inflation was hence politically popular. The terrifying prospect of atomic and biological annihilation has been one factor in this foreshortening, but for most Americans it a very important cloud on anticipation. Intimations as to the factors of buoyancy and anxiousness that enter into purchase plans in the expanding “discretionary” area turn up in the periodic surveys of consumer finances and purchases conducted by George Katona and his colleagues at the Survey Research Center for the Federal Reserve Board.
