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This article addresses several issues pertaining to unemployment and economic development in India as of 1973. When speaking of unemployment, it means the non-utilization or gross under-utilization of available labor. The crucial question for any poor society is how to move up on this scale. When considering productivity in any society it is not sufficient to take account only of those who are employed or self-employed and to leave out of the reckoning all those who are unemployed and whose productivity therefore is zero. Economic development is primarily a question of getting more work done. For this, there are four essential conditions. First, there must be motivation; second there must be some know-how; third, there must be some capital; and fourth, there must be an outlet: additional output requires additional markets.

This article addresses several issues pertaining to economic development in developing countries. With regards to economic development, there is, perhaps, some disillusionment: the task turns out to be much harder than may have been thought--and the newly independent countries are finding the same. Two phenomena, in particular, are giving rise to worldwide concern--mass unemployment and mass migration into cities. For two-thirds of mankind, the aim of a full and happy life with steady improvements of their lot, if not actually receding, seems to be as far away as ever. Many people are having a new look and some say the trouble is that there is too little aid. They admit that there are many unhealthy and disrupting tendencies but suggest that with more massive aid one ought to be able to over-compensate them. If the available aid cannot be massive for everybody, they suggest that it should be concentrated on the countries where the promise of success seems most credible. Not surprisingly, this proposal has failed to win general acceptance. One of the unhealthy and disruptive tendencies in virtually all the developing countries is the emergence, in an ever more accentuated form, of the dual economy, in which there are two different patterns of living as widely separated from each other as two different worlds.

The article discusses the problem of industrial development in the United states. In an underdeveloped society, the means of production are not sufficient, judged by historical standards, to permit a decent life. Life is dominated by a struggle for existence or, to put it more technically: "the standard of living severely limits the style of life." In an overdeveloped society, the means of livelihood are so great that life is dominated by the struggle for status, based on the acquisition and maintenance of commodities. Here, the style of life is dominated by the standard of living. The first is the classic way of capitalism. Historically, it was not planned; it just grew. Its major institutional conditions are private ownership of the means of production, each of which are rather small in scale; it also requires a rational bureaucracy, along with a calculatable law, as a kind of framework. The second model of industrialization is communist. The world historical significance of the Soviet revolution is that for the first time in history, successful industrialization is put through without a class of capitalists. History can be made only in this way, until two conditions occur: the means of power-economic, political and military -- must be enormously enlarged in scale; these means must be decisively centralized and controlled.