In this book, Edmund Phelps weaves together and applies to Italy his two principal interests of the past decade: the imperative of restoring initiative, enterprise and dynamism in a great many industrialized economies, most acutely needed in the eastern European economies amid the wreckage of their experiments with market socialism and communism, and the imperative of extending self-support and involvement in the business sector to the large number of marginalized workers, where his focus was on the high rates of dependency, idleness and crime among less educated in the United States.