Workers' Well-Being and Time Budgets (Methodological Problems)

Economic research on the enhancement of the people's well-being to date has been primarily confined to the consumption of material goods, the dynamics and composition of the population's incomes, and the development of branches of the service sphere. At the same time, such studies have not sufficiently illuminated the purely social aspects of the enhancement of the living standard and cultural level of the people. The task of improving the planning of social development more and more urgently poses the problem of synthesizing these two directions of research. Publications of recent years, particularly studies of the socioeconomic content of the category the "way of life," fill this gap to some degree. (>u>1>/u>) To be sure, the indicators of the population's well-being presently included in the national economic plan reflect a number of aspects of the socialist way of life. They make it possible to depict the most important quantitative characterizations of way of life; the system of indicators used in this section of the plan also provides an orientation toward certain basic qualitative changes in way of life (for example, the substantial transformation of a family's entire home life stands behind the quantitative increase in the availability of well-appointed housing to the population). However, work in this direction is still far from complete. In this regard the formulation of the task of securing the more complete reflection of these processes in national economic planning becomes an urgent matter.