ABSTRACT
Contemporary society is preoccupied with wealth. It is a well-known fact that the great declared objective of Soviet economic planning is "to attain and to surpass the American standard of life". The most forceful argument which is produced in favor of collectivism is that economic planning is the most rapid method for advancing on that scale. The migration of the peasantry to the cities is regarded as the very condition of economic progress. In England, this migration took place in the first half of the nineteenth century, and it is this migration which Soviet economic planners are seeking to speed up. And French economists deplore the fact that fields still retain a much too large proportion of working population. The attention given to problems of productivity certainly exceeds the golden mean, while the problem of "the good life" suffers from neglect.
