The Meaning and Measure of Economic Progress

Consider the levels at which culture and technology relate to each other. Culture, as an input into technology, will to some degree determine the potentiality for scientific and technological advance and will impose constraints and limitations upon such advance. Technology, as an input into culture, will at one level produce, or at least favor, particular patterns of values, sets of roles, and forms of interpersonal relationships and generally will create a human environment and context for cultural change and evolution. At a second level, technology, as an input into culture, provides the wherewithal of the standard of life, making available that which is needed in order to support any cultural superstructure. At this second level, in augmenting the material basis for the cultural superstructure, the impact of technology on culture is economic progress. As an example of this cross-relationship of culture and technology, consider the case of India and the United States. Certainly the experience of urbanized industrialization in the United States would itself both favor and require an ideology and outlook and interpersonal relationships and a human environment different from those of the traditional peasant and craft technologies in the dispersed communities of rural India. But additionally, at the second level, American technology, being vastly more productive, enables leisure and education and aesthetic and intellectual pursuits in the United States to a degree that is not possible in India. It is with this second level of the relationship between technology and culture, via economic progress and the provision of a material basis for the culture superstructure, that this paper is concerned. Specifically, since economic progress, as an increase in the capacity to provide the surplus for cultural fulfilment and social evolution, must be measured, this paper addresses itself to the

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• The Valuation of the Social Income-a Comment on Professor Kuznets' Reflections

  John Hicks, J R Hicks•Economica•1948

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