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In the standard paradigm of orthodox economics, resource endowments determine personal wealth and personal income distribution. These endowments are taken as "given" exogenous variables, at least to economists. Consequently, remedies for inequalities in the distribution of wealth and income fall largely outside the purview of the positive science of neoclassical economics and can only be justified on normative non-economic grounds. The "new economics" introduced by Major C.H. Douglas in the years immediately following the First World War predicted both an exponential growth in production arising from technological change and an increase in inequality due to unemployment following the introduction of labour-saving technologies. Douglas additionally forecast a futile search for new forms of employment if income distribution continued to derive primarily from the use of productive resources and if an economy based on the profit motive prevented technical progress from creating an age of leisure (Douglas, 1919;1920;1922;1924).To counter this scenario, he designed proposals which attempted to place every citizen on a level economic playing-field. They derived from the view that all social production originates in a common cultural inheritance of past invention, with present individual effort playing a secondary role. The concept of providing citizens with freedom to select employment and consumption patterns according to non-market criteria, i.e. to turn economic theory into a tool rather than a dictator of policy, was well ahead of its time. Although dependence on a single form of paid employment as an income source throughout adult life has been the exception rather than the rule (most particularly for women), the assumption that provision need only be made for temporary and exceptional interruptions in earning capacities underlies welfare state provision based on the Beveridge Report. Reliance on a "portfolio of income streams" (Handy, 1993) has been the norm not only in pre-and postindustrial society but throughout the process of industrialization itself. From such a perspective the Douglas/"New Age" economics of the 1920s (as distinct from the Social Credit movement of the 1930s) offers imaginative insights into the current theory and practice of economic and social policy. Three Approaches to Security of Personal IncomeThe Beveridge Plan The Beveridge Plan was the culmination of measures to relieve temporarily occurring poverty due to transitional "flaws" in the economic system. From the

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