This book intends to be helpful to people-students and oth- ers-who are
beginning to think about how to change the world via that activity we
call development planning. The issues of What is Progress? and How do we
get it? are world-wide, although they appear in different form in
societies like our own from the way they do in the Third World countries
with their explicit development planning. These are two very big
questions and have no easy or final answers. However, we can think about
them in more rather than less effective ways. Thinking about them can be
both a way of beginning to take action on issues of growth and change,
and a way of understanding our own situation. vii viii I PREFACE This
book argues that thinking about development plan- ning has gotten into
trouble by dividing economy from so- ciety, and misconstruing
moral-social-political issues as tech- nical ones. Development planning
has centered on economic planning, treating social issues as obstacles
to growth, or as problems arising out of economic change. The book takes
up a number of specific topics which enter into development
planning-topics such as the organization of work, educa- tional
planning, family policy-to show how in reality the social and the
economic, the moral and the technical, are one, and how thinking about
policy in each area should therefore take an integrated perspective.