"[3] He hoped the volumes would play a role in the open conspiracy to establish a progressive world government that he had been promoting since the mid-1920s.
Wells had great difficulty devising a comprehensive book discussing the world's economic life from a psychological point of view.
[5] In early 1929 he overcame the discouragement these difficulties caused and resumed work on the book, with the help of Amber Reeves on the sections on money and economics and of Alexander Carr-Saunders on demography.
[7] But the Great Depression restrained sales and Wells's optimistic utopianism struck many as passé and naïve in the increasingly violent political climate of the 1930s.
Two historical figures are praised near the beginning and the end of The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind because they seem to Wells to be essentially linked to his enterprise: Roger Bacon, a precursor of the Enlightenment, and Denis Diderot, the first writer to envision the possibilities of modern encyclopaedias.
"[11] Wells proposes that there are three fundamental types of persona that differ in many ways, but in particular in their attitude toward property: (1) the peasant; (2) the nomad; (3) the priest.
"[12] Wells seriously entertains the proposal of Frederick Soddy that the "money manipulator" may be "a new type whose primary delight is domination and oppression through relative gain" but concludes that if this is so, "the conception pervading this book .
"[13] Wells's treatment of contemporary political institutions is aggressively satirical, but he attributes their shortcomings to their need to accommodate the biological heritage human beings have inherited to solve the problem of what he calls "assent," or legitimation.
"[15] Religion's social role has been to a large degree educational; moreover, "[e]ducation has been the last field of intellectual activity to pass out of religious control, and it is still imperfectly and doubtfully released.
"[17] The book was translated in German in 1932, with the title Arbeit, Wohlstand und das Glück der Menschheit.