In this highly personal work, Boulding traces his lifelong search for human betterment. Believing that human betterment required certain economic changes, he studied economics as an undergraduate at Oxford. A careful examination of the American labour movement, however, convinced him that "economics alone could not solve the problems of human betterment." Boulding"s later involvement in the study of conflict resolution and the analysis of world culture eventually led him to evolutionary theory, which has occupied much of his time and energy since the late 1960s.