The Affluent Society

...Galbraith they ought to take notice...

...And it was also a formula about whose likelihood of success Galbraith had no doubts, as he tells us in the introduction to the recently released third edition...

...It's a rare crystal ball that allows you to "predict" in 1976 what happened two years earlier...

...This tendency toward over-production is reinforced by an aggressive and costly ($15 billion per year) advertising effort that plays on human frailties and dupes more people into working more hours than would George Bittlingmayer is a graduate student in economics at the University of Chicago...

...HARVARD'S TALLEST TALE (continued from page 4) the case with The Affluent Society, where he ascribed mysterious powers of enchantmeter to advertising...

...And if this isn't bad enough, there is also a chronic "social imbalance," an insufficient provision of government services, stemming from the reluctance of the citizens to pay what Galbraith has elsewhere called their "proper taxes...

...True, their research has almost always found his conclusions doltish, but in mankind's struggle up from darkness no contribution is to be sniffed at...

...Steel and the Republicans...

...The second explanation is that Galbraith has at his command more economic insight than we had thought, and knows that nothing destroys a book's used-market circulation like the appearance of a new edition...

...An addition that offers some insight into the author's personality is his observation that a depression can occur before rising prices are stabilized, that is, while they are rising as in 1974...

...Galbraith then takes the opportunity to make himself appear prescient by adding in a footnote: "As the experience of the mid-seventies has also affirmed...

...Citing the experience of the Great Depression, Galbraith had observed in the earlier edition that "in the early days of the New Deal, the slaughter of little pigs, a primitive form of production control, created a mild form of political trauma...

...Unchanged too is his ability to write without irony about the Soviet Union as a place where people have "the ability to concentrate their lesser scientific and engineering resources more effectively to their chosen ends...

...Further, the economists fail to appreciate the clarity and mellifluousness of his prose...

...It was, if you were a bit leftish or just politically confused, an absorbing and believable drama, complete with the angels, archangels, and fallen angels of the secular heavens (Marx and Veblen battling U.S...

...Perhaps this is because they almost all write in an idiom vaguely suggestive of the dialect heard on police radios, but when they read Dr...

...Galbraith acquired his taste for this sort of thing during his World War II stint as a price controller and has been itching ever since to do social planning on a grander scale...

...He is one of the most elegant writers of English now practicing the art...

...We place too much emphasis on producing more goods because our notioos concerning work and production, like those of a self-made man, belong to an age of scarcity and are illsuited to an age of affluence...

...According to Dr...

...There are some obligatory additions to the Introduction that mention that Keynesian economics didn't turn out to be all that was promised, and that the author had erred in not realizing what a danger defense expenditures were to peace and laughter...

...There was no inevitable tendency toward over-production...

...It's a shame Marx isn't around to do some paragraphsnipping...

...Galbraith is still confident of his ability and the ability of like-minded folks to plan and direct the rest of us to a better world...

...So, we remain with the question, if the new Affluent Society is pretty much like the old, what prompted it...

...Hesto presto Dr...

...Galbraith opened fantastic research opportunities for hundreds of young scholars...

...More significant is the deletion from the second edition of a paragraph that had expressed the view that agricultural over-production is inevitable in the absence of Galbraithian production controls...

...The new Affluent Society holds few surprises, and its argument should by now be familiar to any long-suffering reader of the Times Op-Ed page...

...The first is that the new edition was born of the "need to produce" and midwifed by the publisher's advertising effort which is enticing readers with the claim that "now in its updated form, it is essential reading for all Americans...

...When he writes glowingly about the "well-run and wellregulated community, with a sound school system, good recreational opportunities and a good police force--in short, a community where public services have kept pace with private production," we can imagine how badly he would like to be at the controls, running the show with the absorption of a model train fanatic, a little more recreation here, a little less production there...

...A whole generation afflicted with guilt over its own good fortune, and mildly curious about how all those goodies came into existence, and why, despite them, we are still unhappy, took its economic truth from that first edition of The Affluent Society...

...otherwise be the case...

...He was to try that formula twice again, but with diminishing returns, first in The New Industrial State and then in Economics and the Public Purpose, his "final summary volume" on our ailments and his cures...

...Now the claim made on the jacket blurb is that "the author has...set many aspects of his basic argument into the wider perspectives opened up by the intervening years...

...Galbrai~h the Madison Avenue magnificoes wexe enslaving millions of grown men and women into making purchases that were useless and at times even injurious...

...A copy of the book was invariably to be found with the I Ching and one of Hermann Hesse's essays on navel contemplation, and its message came eventually to serve as the conventional wisdom at innumerable cocktail parties on the Upper East Side...

...What has changed in the new, improved edition...

...His 1969 book, The New Industrial State, 36 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1977...

...Yet if the truth must be told, not much has changed from the second edition that appeared in 1969...

...Putting aside the matter of the author's desire to correct a few failed predictions and to update a couple of figures, we are left with two explanations...

...BOOK REVIEW The Affluent Society John Kenneth Galbraith (Third Edition, Revised) / Houghton Mifflin / $7.95 George Bittlingmayer It has been almost twenty years since John Kenneth Galbraith was first inspired by the Profits of Forecasting Doom to tell us that we are engaged in a no-win rat race...

...The book received exuberant praise from his fans amongst the congenitally fearful, but when economists examined his claims they discovered advertising to be unexplored territory...

...The contrast between the Soviet Union, where people choose their ends, and the United States, where people are told what to do by Madison Avenue, is indeed striking...

...In the wake of meat shortages, the interruption of many agricultural price supports, and record exports abroad, better judgment dictated that those remarks had to go...