Yet the extraordinary rate of what we have come

 to understand as economic growth of a few wealthy nations,

 particularly of the United States, probably has been more

 important than any other single factor in stimulating

 the idea of universal economic progress. The idea of
 8
 progress, Western in origin, found its greatest expression

 and support in the United States as did its underlying

 motive force, the belief in and the employment of applied

 technology, exhibited principally in an ability to create

 more and more from less and less. Technology and its

 teachinghave come to be accepted almost without question

 as a principal ingredient of material progress and the

 key to its continuance, replacing or supplementing trade

 and capital accumulation in that regard as a primum

 mobile of economic growth. It hardly needs stressing

 that technology--as such--can only be seen in a museum.

 All these concepts, theoretical and abstract in

themselves, rest upon an equally abstract belief in


 Progress may be thought of as change which is
directed or tends toward some ends or goals generally
believed to be "good." Progress and economic development
often have been considered as being synonymous, although
the recent reemergence of concern for ecology and for
the social quality of human existence have called that
view into question.

 Cf. Albert O. Hirschman, The Strategy of
Economic Development (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1958), chap. i. "Preliminary Explora-
tions," sec., The Search for the Primum Mobile, pp. 1-7.