Abstract

Abundance: Threat or Promise?

U.S. President John F. Kennedy has warned that Americans face no greater domestic problem in the 1960's than that posed by automation. The U.S. Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz has buttressed the President's statement with his estimate that Americans shall need 16,000,000 new jobs in the next five years just to maintain the work force at its present unsatisfactory level of unemployment. "The big push will occur," Wirtz has said, "around 1965. We have only two years to find the answer-and to get it working." Yet despite the magnitude, and urgency, of the problem there has been no agreement on what needs to be done, nor even any very clear idea of the nature of the problem. And that is because attention has been focused on the wrong threat: it is not automation that menaces people. The real threat is abundance.