The Affluent Society (1958)

This book was on Newsweek's list of the top 100 books, which I am currently reading through. I don't have much of an interest in reading about economics, which accounts for a mere three stars in this review, but as far as economics goes, The Affluent Society was well-written and easy to read and contained quite a bit of interesting information, even if I didn't always agree with the author. In some ways it seems he really has a handle on the post WWII economic society in America, not only at the time he wrote the book in 1958 but even today. However, many of his ideas sound good on paper but do not necessarily work in practice. I am all for keeping our public roads in good shape and our parks clean and, most importantly, open, but heavy taxation today may not result in any better care of our roads or parks and may just end up lining the pockets of our government leaders. Also, his ideas on unemployment insurance and social welfare (which basically have been put in to practice), may be good ideas in a society where idleness is frowned upon, but this no longer seems to be the case and the system is often abused at taxpayer expense. ( )

This is one of my favorite books. If the following review is more gushing than helpful, I apologize in advance.

It's difficult to attack the capitalist system without falling into polemic. For every table in Das Kapital, every carefully worked out formula showing the future fall in profits, there is "Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor..." or something similarly florid. John Kenneth Galbraith is not a Marxist, and he is not polemic, but he still manages to lay out a convincing and extensive attack on obsolete ideas in economics and the American economy. The 1998 Mariner Books edition was published forty years after the original, and the author has updated it some. Still, it is amazing to see how the text is just as relevant in 1998, or even 2008, as it was fifty years ago.

Galbraith begins first by defining "conventional wisdom," a phrase he coined. The next few chapters give a brief history of economic thought, emphasizing the importance the concept of scarcity has. The rest of the book explains how these ideas are obsolete, that affluence is the norm and poverty the exception. His conclusion is that there is a lack of "social balance" between private and public spending, a balance which must be corrected through a more active government and higher taxes.

If you just read the last clause of the last paragraph, you would probably think of Galbraith as garden variety Liberalus americanus, basically preaching the same tune as FDR and LBJ. In a way, that's true: while his plan is more extensive than what any elected official would try, Galbraith is not a revolutionary in his methods. His solution is not what makes The Affluent Society a good book, though. It is his analysis and writing that make it such a fantastic read. The first sentence, "Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive" reminds me of the beginning of Pride and Prejudice. Galbraith may not be Jane Austen, but he has a similar dry sense of humor. (As an economist, Galbraith is usually classified as an Institutionalist, and his style is close to Thorstein Veblen, one of the school's founding thinkers.) Even those who do not agree with his conclusions (which in the updated edition, Galbraith himself admits are not infallible) should enjoy his attack on the orthodoxy of social inertia. The ubiquity of the phrase "conventional wisdom" shows the power of his case that sometimes, if not nearly all the time, the cleanest, most convenient theory is not true. ( )

Chapter 17 on the Theory of Social Balance is brilliant. ( )

Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Affluent Society. Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 1998. A thought-provoking book. I don't know if I agree with all of Galbraith's conclusions, although I certainly sympathize with his goal and his exhortation at the end of the book: the affluent society should not allow itself to neglect the poor. Of all the things in the book, I appreciated the brief history of economics at the beginning, the presentation of the idea of conventional wisdom, and the idea of the New Class.