ABSTRACT
In the past ten years or so our ideas about the nature of the society in which we live have been changing rapidly. We have become aware that we are an opulent society, by any comparative or historical standard, and that we are becoming progressively more opulent as time goes on, as a more or less automatic consequence of the way our economic institutions function. At the same time, we have become aware that the ultimate sources of our large and growing wealth are very different from what the conventional wisdom of our times would have us believe; that they are to be found not in the individual parsimony and hard labour of our public imagery but in the accumulation of capital and application of technical progress by corporate enterprises and the acquisition of increasing skill and knowledge by individuals—the accumulation of human capital.
