Managing Growth

For some time, welfare-state capitalism has been on the defensive. Programs that were taken for granted now face destructive budget cuts, and crude individualistic theorists have won the initiative in public debate. Peter Albin argues that this second-class status of social services is built into the structure of industrial society. He tries earnestly to provide economic arguments and programs to regain the offensive; but I feel that the inborn dynamic that Albin finds in industrial capitalism thwarts his effort.

Political economists have frequently observed that the American economy is divided into two sectors?a prosperous corporate economy and an “outside” economy whose problems cannot be redressed by pumping money i...