ATER a decade of struggle against the socially debilitating effects of mass unemployment, the United States succeeded during World War II in virtually eliminating its unemployment problem. This experience has given impetus to the goal of eliminating unemployment in peacetime. Conversion of the wartime achievement of full employment into a continuing peacetime reality has become the test of our basic national policies. The Act of signed by the President in February 1946, is a milder version of the Murray Full Employment Bill originally adopted by the Senate, with more restricted objectives than could have been read into the Murray Bill. However, the following pronouncement made by the President of the United States when he signed the Act indicates the broad support of the objective: enacting this legislation, the Congress and the President are responding to an overwhelming demand of the people. The legislation gives expression to a deep-seated desire for a conscious and positive attack upon the ever-recurring problems of mass unemployment and ruinous depression. l Sociologists may well take cognizance) of the widespread acceptance of the full employment objective by the people of the United States, Great Britain, and other democratic countries. The recent legislative enactment may be regarded as the first step toward a full employment objective. This objective implemented by a succession of policies will, with the passage of time, have profound effects on our national life and on our dealings with other nations. Sociologists, like their colleagues in the other social sciences, will need to address themselves to studies of the effects of a full employment policy on social problems of concern to them. The depression during the 1930 decade stimulated a variety of studies of the pathological manifestations of a malfunctioning national economy.2 A unified national effort to maintain a condition of full employment and high levels of income can likewise be expected to generate research as to the positive effects of a progressively improving social-economic environment. The effects may involve modifications in the role of government in the economic life of the community, governmental organizational structure, levels and standards of living, forms of social control, institutional arrangements, patterns of family life, birth and marriage rates, population growth, rural-urban population distribution, and many other aspects of culture with which sociologists deal. The starting point in any planning of a full employment program is the number of people who are able, willing and seeking to work and the goal is their adequate, regular, and remunerative employment, which will in turn yield progressively higher levels of living and greater security to all sectors of the population. The human factors in production and consumption are the keynote of the full employment goal. In these respects a full employment policy emphasizes and is oriented toward ends and * Address given before American Sociological Society at the 40th annual meeting, March I-3, I946, Cleveland, Ohio. lEvening Star, Washington, D.C., February 20,