The Affluent Society

We are gravely suspicious of any tendency to expend less than the maximum effort, for this has long been a prime economic virtue.

However, the greatest prospect that we face—indeed what must now be counted one of the central economic goals of our society—is to eliminate toil as a required economic institution.

resources. If such is the nature of our system that we have production only because we first create the wants that require it, we will have few resources to spare. We will be rich but never quite rich enough to spare anything much for the poor—including our own.

From their earliest years, the children of the New Class are carefully indoctrinated in the importance of finding an occupation from which they will derive satisfaction—one which will involve not toil but enjoyment.

He wants above all that they will have an occupation that is interesting and rewarding. On this, he hopes, indeed, that they will take their learned parent as their model.

To have failed to solve the problem of producing goods would have been to continue man in his oldest and most grievous misfortune. But to fail to see that we have solved it, and to fail to proceed thence to the next tasks, would be fully as tragic.

One of the inevitable outlets for the intellectual energies and inventiveness of the New Class is, in fact, in finding substitutes for routine and repetitive manual labor.

No aristocrat ever contemplated the loss of feudal privileges with more sorrow than a member of this class would regard his descent into ordinary labor where the reward was only the pay. From time to time, schoolteachers leave their posts for substantially higher paid factory work. The action makes headlines because it represents an unprecedented d

For, in fact, the differences in what labor means to different people could not be greater. For some, and probably a majority, it remains a stint to be performed. It may be preferable, especially in the context of social attitudes toward production, to doing nothing. Nevertheless, it is fatiguing or monotonous or, at a minimum, a source of no parti