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Alexander wrestles with the problem of the lags and discrepancies with which society is plagued today: emotionally we live in the past, decades or centuries behind science and technology. He points up sharply the 'incongruity between ideology and economy', due to the fact that the production of material goods has become so much the end rather than the means to the fuller life. It is a platitude that the productive capacity for material goods will sooner or later outdistance the absorptive capacity of our own or other markets—assuming we emerge from the current chaos, an assumption to which Alexander gloomily and justifiably refuses to subscribe. Historically, such a discrepancy between production and markets has led repeatedly to wars for markets and to widespread unemployment, with consequent insecurity, loss of self-esteem, sense of loss of social usefulness, and the many other emotional complications of physical deprivation and symbolic rejection (by society). Our culture has failed so utterly to help man's development along other lines—to instill an appetite for poetry or music as well as lounging chairs and shoes—that even if we were to achieve the millenium, even if we were to feed all the hungry and clothe all the naked, man would be left idle and wasted once he is no longer needed for more than the briefest periods at the machines or in the fields. Alexander does not minimize the urgent need today for vastly increased production of material goods, but in looking to the future he pleads for a drastic reorientation in our attitude towards the nonmaterial, lest man on a universal scale find himself 'on the shelf', lost and aimless—unless before that he has managed to blast himself and his civilization from the face of the earth. Barring that eventuality, man's likelihood of utilizing constructively the energy which has been liberated by ever more wonderful machines will lie 'only through education of the masses, with a greater emphasis on the liberal art