These hidden dangers in American society were more than failures for the for-export model of economic achievement through corporate capitalism. They were potential sources of social disruption, individual violence, political challenge, and autonomous mass organizations. After talking about crime and thinking about political and social stability, one fraction of the ruling class conceived a vast project of institutional reform and social integration in order to improve the productivity of the system through a massive expansion of education and research, and to develop new channels of integration through a program of social organization and public welfare.

....There were some difficulties in the 1960 election, but the fraction of the ruling class organized around Kennedy did win the political battle against short-sighted conservatism. Subsequently, under pressure from the grassroots, a series of reformist policies were put into effect, directed at rationalizing and stabilizing the uneven capitalist development of the United States. Kennedy's new Frontier policies and Johnson's Great Society programs were backed by a much more active state 1

There is evidence that a similar economic and political situation prevailed in Canada in the late 1950's and early 1960's Dandurand observes:

Since about 1957, faced with an economic downturn and an increase in unemployment, attention began. to be focused on the inadequate performance of the labour market. This was not only because of the economic problem that was revealed, but also because the underlying under-employment and disparities between provinces, regions and categories could potentially lead-to social and political problems.2

Dandurand's conclusion, that unemployment was perceived as a serious political problem by political elites, is confirmed in the 1961 report of the Special Committee of the Senate on Manpower and Employment. The report referred to the personal costs of unemployment for the individual and the economic costs for society, and then stated:

Furthermore, the mere awareness that a significant number of people are out of work--and with the modern development of statistics and the means of communicating them widespread public awareness is never long delayed--has an adverse effect on social morale and the climate of enterprise. In fact, the number of people without jobs is one of the most common and most important standards used to evaluate the performance of a free society and in the present world of ideological conflict it is hardly an overstatement to say that a high level of employment it is a goal deserving of the utmost priority.3