ABSTRACT
Many students of economics come to the subject because they are interested in the possible improvement of society. The author of this work (like many others in the late twenties and early thirties) came to economics because he abhorred mass unemployment and wanted to know why society was failing to avoid the stupidity of idle men and machines combined with crying real needs for the products of those men and machines. The problems of the present age are different. The huge and growing disparities of wealth between the rich developed and the poor underdeveloped countries of the world would be the problem which would be most likely to attract him to economics if he were now starting once more at the beginning.
