ABSTRACT
The questions that form the core of any discussion of the worth of social indicators are: What good for the American people would be served by the passage of the Full Opportunity and Social Accounting Act; what role might state and local governments play in implementing, and participating in creating a national social policy. To develop a reliable set of social indicators means to have a fairly undistorted notion of what American national social objectives are. Social indicators would yield a good rough approximation of optimal and minimal standards for American community life. The greatest responsibility is to determine how social indicators might be employed in the areas of foreign affairs. One gets the impression in listening to critics of the social indicators legislation that it has a necessary and almost infinite spill over into the realm of policy decision-making. The purpose of the social indicators is to give the American public a corollary theory for the quality of life.
