Secretly, like an earthquake underground hardly noticed, a revolution is going on which will eventually change completely the way the world is organized. The world, at least the Western world, as we have known it for a long time has been based on two unchallenged assumptions. The first is that economic progress is by far the most important measure of any country’s well-being. And the second assumption, closely allied to the first, is that ‘employment,’ meaning employment in work, is by far the most important measure of any man’s success in life. Because these assumptions have been automatically, unthinkingly, installed as Holy Writ in all societies, the conclusion has been drawn as a matter of course that lack of economic progress and rising ‘unemployment’ are twin evils representing ultimate disaster in a nation.
These assumptions are going to disappear. The cult of economic progress has simply ended up breeding selfishness, greed and crass materialism in nation after nation. And the Puritanical insistence that gainful employment is the be-all and end-all of a man’s life has degraded man to the status of an anxious automaton.
Quality of life is going to replace economic progress as the measure of how well a