Writing style has stood the test of time as well as the arguments
A true classic that is as relevant to explaining today's society as that in which Galbraith wrote it - and never more so than Galbraith's argument that we need a better social balance between private and public expenditure. As the gap grows between the urban rich and poor, he notes, more of the rich are able to opt out of public services such as schools, police and transport. With urbanization a dominant theme of the coming decades, it's worth being reminded of Galbraith's observations on how public expenditure on urban infrastructure is generally presented in political discourse - "at best, public services are a necessary evil; at worst, they are a malign tendency against which an alert community must exercise eternal vigilance" - which, as he points out, leads to some interesting contradictions - "Vacuum cleaners to ensure clean houses are praise-worthy and essential in our standard of living. Street cleaners to ensure clean streets are an unfortunate expense. Partly as a result, our houses are generally clean and our streets generally filthy."
Galbraith's philosophical arguments against extreme wealth inequality are both increasingly unfashionable and increasingly urgent; the trend he identifies - "few things are more evident in modern social history than the decline of interest in inequality as an economic issue" - has hardly been arrested as the world has globalized. Galbraith quotes Tawney as noting that people who think they should have unfettered enjoyment of their inherited money do not generally think that others should have unfettered enjoyment of their inherited physical strength or cunning - "Those who dread a dead-level of income or wealth... do not, it seems, dread a dead-level of law and order, and of security of life and property" - an observation that's highly applicable to inequality considered on the scale of the modern global economy.
Galbraith's pithy and wryly amused writing style has stood the test of time as well as the arguments. Perhaps my favourite example comes when Galbraith is commenting on the concern that social security makes poor people idle: the "ancient art of evading work", he says, is not the preserve of any particular class or occupation, and "the art of genteel and elaborately concealed idleness may well reach its highest development in the upper executive reaches of the modern corporation."
Hail, Galbraith!!
John Kenneth Galbraith was one of the great public intellectuals of 20th century America. He advised Presidents and politicians, wrote best-selling books, taught economics at Harvard, appeared on TV, and served as the U.S. Ambassador to India. Nevertheless, mainstream economists looked down their noses at him. They scoffed at his sweeping generalizations. They questioned his technical prowess, noting that his books had no math. Many suspected that he was a "mere sociologist" masquarading as an economist.
These critics may have been jealous of Galbraith's literary fame and towering public profile. In any event, they certainly misconstrued his significance in American intellectual life. Galbraith's great gift as a thinker was his razor-sharp eye for cant. He knew where economic ideas came from, how they supported vested interests, and where they diverged from the plain facts of everyday life -- and he conveyed these lessons to educated general readers in elegant prose. In the end, he may have been a gadfly and critic, not a model builder -- but so what? If mainsteam economists taught us how to think about markets, Galbraith taught us how to think about mainstream economics.
"The Affluent Society" is one of his masterpieces. Written in the 1950s, ideas fly from its pages, touching on everything from Ricardian economics to oligopolies and inflation. The central idea, however, is arresting. Galbraith argued that modern economics was forged in the austere world of the 19th century, when national economies struggled simply to feed and clothe their populations. Sensible at the time, the core assumptions of economics were carried over to a different century facing a different set of problems. In the 20th century, supermarkets bursted with unnecessary soaps and cereals, car models changed every year, and billions of advertising dollars were spent on campaigns to convince consumers that they needed items they never even knew they wanted.
Galbraith argued that, with the problem of scarcity more or less solved, society was free to loosen the connection between income and labor, and to spend more money on public goods such as schools, hospitals, and clean air. He rejected as anachronistic the objection that such measures would reduce economic efficiency by mandating higher taxes or rewarding idleness: what was the value of having an efficient economic system if the goods it produced answered no urgent human needs? Galbraith thought that society should focus on the development of human capacities and the building of decent communities and workplaces, and not fret unduly over allocative efficiency.
Galbraith was wrong about many things, but he was always thought-provoking and mind-expanding. The continuing force of "The Affluent Society" will be clear to anyone who reflects on the crazy popularity of SUVs or tallies up the money we lavish on pets -- in a day and age when American cats get better medical care than most African children, it's safe to say that the supply side problem has finally been solved (at least for us and our pets). The book should be read by all serious students of economics or 20th century American society, and it belongs on any bookshelf of social criticism next to the works of Thorstein Veblen and C. Wright Mills.
The Hobo Philosopher
John Kenneth Galbraith is probably the economist that I have read most. This book is a classic and very much worth reading for it analysis of the market system. But when all is said and done I consider it more a work of speculative fiction. I read a book similar to this by Bertrand Russell back in the 60's but both books are lacking a bit in scepticism of the human beast. The very idea that we would all be so wealthy one day that we wouldn't know what to do as a society - or that somebody would have to mail us a check in order to encourage spending and that poverty would be a secondary problem etc. etc. etc. Is plain naivete or maybe wishfull thinking.
Books written by Richard Noble - The Hobo Philosopher:
"Hobo-ing America: A Workingman's Tour of the U.S.A.."
"A Summer with Charlie"
"A Little Something: Poetry and Prose"
"Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother"
"The Eastpointer" Selections from award winning column.
courage of thinking
it' s the first time I read something like that in economics.
Affluenza?
Written long before modern realization of how our desire for affluence as part of our "right by birth" has largely caused such things as global warming and elimination of species, Galbraith gives a very indepth exposé of the origins and tendencies of the North American material ethos. I would have given this book 4.5 or 5 stars save for the fact that it takes a bit of work on the reader to bring it fully up to date with respect to some of the consequences we now see.
That said, I would heartily recommend this work prior to reading his or other author's more recent works on the direction of modern western society.
