John Kenneth Galbraith the Good Society Book Review

F rom its urbane opening line – "Wealth is not without its advantages..." – John Kenneth Galbraith's bestselling set on on some of America'due south near treasured economical myths survives as the apotheosis of an impressive public intellectual'south restatement of classic liberalism: provocative, humane and entertaining, a volume that shaped the American mind from the 50s and 60s to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Equally well as tackling economic shibboleths, Galbraith too coined some hit and influential concepts of his ain. "The conventional wisdom", the title of his opening affiliate, for instance, has now passed into the language. At outset, this book was intended to be a study of poverty entitled Why the Poor Are Poor, until Galbraith's wife suggested the more upbeat The Affluent Order. Certainly, some of its entertaining iconoclasm derives from that kickoff typhoon. In the terminate, even so, information technology expressed a marriage of British theory, especially Keynesianism, with American industrial experience, making a mid-Atlantic bestseller for the postwar world.

Earlier reaching its fundamental message, the first half of The Flush Society is devoted to demonstrating how classical economic theory, from Adam Smith to Malthus to David Ricardo, projects a grim view of human prospects, casting an air of pessimism over the socioeconomic written report of the human condition. This Galbraith is at pains to dispel. He is a witty and engaging optimist for whom Gross domestic product is "the accustomed measure out non only of economic just of larger social accomplishment".

The thought that the production of goods and services should be the mensurate of civilised success plainly bears the influence of its time, but he too disputed the idea that increased material production is the only indicator of economic wellbeing. Through his book, Galbraith, a Canadian who became an important figure in American life, especially as a favoured confidant of President John F Kennedy, first began to emerge equally an unofficial spokesman for a more progressive American materialism during the 60s, an era in which capitalism and the cold war became inextricably interwoven. As a disciple of Keynes, he argued that the United states should invest dynamically in roads, schools and hospitals.

Galbraith, the inveterate populariser, is never less than quotable: "The written report of money, in a higher place all other fields in economics," he once wrote, "is i in which complication is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is then elementary the mind is repelled. With something so important, a deeper mystery seems but decent."

Galbraith became a favoured confidant of President John F Kennedy. Photo: CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

In this spirit, the second half of The Affluent Order assaults some deeply held economic myths. What is the meaning of productivity if many of the goods we produce are merely bogus needs promoted by the advertising media of mass social club? "As a society becomes increasingly affluent," writes Galbraith, "wants are increasingly created by the process past which they are satisfied." In addition to this Dependence Effect, why ignore waste and extravagance in the individual sector while simultaneously speaking of regime expenditure "squandered" on public works?

Galbraith is not just an articulate and contrarian cheerleader for a superior kind of American consumerism. He is also, quite presciently, bang-up to strike a note of alert about aggrandizement. Just in the finish, he is contemptuous of a social club in which "the bland pb the bland". His principal project is to break "the thralldom of a myth – that the production of appurtenances is the fundamental problem of our lives".

To emphasise this, Galbraith is resoundingly provocative. "In the world of pocket-sized lunacy, the behaviour of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd. The notion that ours is a world in which production is of supreme importance is an old i. So is the respective behaviour. The discovery that production is no longer of such urgency involves a major wrench in our attitudes. What was audio economical behaviour before cannot be audio economical behaviour now."

One consequence of this analysis is, for Galbraith, "the central economic goal of our society – to eliminate toil as a required economic establishment. This," he goes on, "is not a utopian vision. Nosotros are already well on the way." In one case, he says, there was always "a leisure class". This has been replaced by a new course, in other words past the kind of people who might read a book such equally The Affluent Club: bureaucrats, engineers, doctors, teachers, designers, academics, journalists and advertising executives. For this new class, economic theories shaped by the harsh conditions of mass poverty have no relevance, being ill-suited to the realities of a much richer age.

With the perspective of hindsight, much of Galbraith reads similar a long footnote to the slap-up American claim that the truthful goal of a free guild should be "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". In 1979, near a generation after he get-go completed this essay in economic optimism, Galbraith ventilated a few 2d thoughts: "Let u.s.a. put elimination of poverty on the social and political agenda. And let us protect our abundance from those who, in the name of defending information technology, would leave the planet only with its ashes. The flush society is not without its flaws. But it is well worth saving from its own adverse or subversive tendencies."

At the end of his life, speaking on Usa goggle box, he articulated a cardinal liberal pragmatism: "Where the market works, I'm for that. Where the government is necessary, I'm for that. I'm deeply suspicious of somebody who says, 'I'g in favour of privatisation', or, 'I'grand securely in favour of public ownership.' I'm in favour of whatsoever works in the particular case."

A Signature Sentence
"Wealth is non without its advantages and the instance to the contrary, although information technology has oftentimes been made, has never proved widely persuasive."

Iii to Compare
JK Galbraith: The Smashing Crash 1929 (1955)
JK Galbraith: The New Industrial Country (1967)
Vance Packard: The Hidden Persuaders (1957)

The Flush Society is published by Penguin (£x.99). Click here to purchase a copy for £9.01

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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/11/100-best-nonfiction-books-affluent-society-jk-galbraith