Economic Realities
Auerbach, Carl
line brochures, well illustrated and each about 36 pages long, available free from the National Park Service, Interior Department, Washington, D.C. One is called "Our Vanishing Shoreline" and the...
...In this way, the consumer determines what and how much shall be produced...
...The retired worker should be accorded his customary living standards...
...To provide economic security, without having constantly to increase output, Galbraith proposes that unemployment compensation be paid as long as unemployment lasts and in amounts which increase as unemployment mounts to slightly below the regular weekly wage and decrease as full employment approaches...
...Liberals have argued that public services should be financed by progressive income taxation because this would help to reduce inequality...
...As the consumer buys everything else he uses, he should also be made to buy essential public services...
...These ideas purport to tell us how to utilize our material and human resources most efficiently from the point of view of maximizing production, the overriding goal of a poor society hard put to alleviate misery...
...The present national campaign to persuade people to buy things they do not need at prices they cannot afford to pay, in order to combat the depression, is proof at hand of Galbraith's thesis...
...That The Affluent Society is a best seller is a tribute to what the author has to say and to how he says it...
...Many of us have long come to expect articles and book reviews on our natural resources problems from The Progressive...
...A certain degree of compensated unemployment would become a normal feature of the economy...
...I find it difficult to see why this system would not help to maintain a level of aggregate demand for goods which would require full capacity operation and thereby eliminate the degree of unemployment considered essential for price stability...
...Stalemate results and public services suffer...
...I suggest that to the citizens' organizations listed by Mr...
...Raymond Mostek Vice President Illinois Audubon Society Chicago, 111...
...Galbraith agrees that it would be desirable, if possible, to reduce inequality and achieve social balance at one and the same time...
...Only the Affluent Society, it might be said, can realize the ethical Marxian creed, "From each according to his ability...
...Ben DuBois Secretary, Independent Bankers Ass'n...
...His criticism of our economy parallels the basic criticism which socialists have directed at the capitalist system of production for profit: it does not guarantee that society will get what it needs...
...But he insists that we are concerned with maximizing production only to provide jobs and not because we value the goods produced...
...The IADF is an affiliate of the International League for the Rights of Man, leading consultative non-governmental organization cooperating with the United Nations in human rights...
...Social balance—"a satisfactory relationship between the supply of privately produced goods and services and those of the state" —is destroyed...
...Finally, Galbraith points out, the Affluent Society can afford to consider alternative ways of doing things without being dominated by the fear of their effect on productive efficiency...
...Lush palaces continue to be built in Las Vegas while our cities decay and society in general is starved for schools, hospitals and health, sanitation, law enforcement, and recreational facilities...
...So he calls upon society to cultivate the children of the poor, thereby assuring that poverty will not be self-perpetuating...
...We want to compliment you for procuring from Senator Lehman this most excellent and challenging article...
...Reviewed by Carl Auerbach If, as Lord Keynes said, we are ruled by ideas and by very little else, this new book by J. K. Galbraith, professor of economics at Harvard, elaborates ideas by which we shall come to be ruled...
...The two goals must be separated...
...368 pp...
...To finance the satisfaction of these manufactured wants, a towering structure of debt must be erected...
...One is called "Our Vanishing Shoreline" and the other "The National Park Wilderness...
...to each according to his need...
...They are irrelevant today, Galbraith maintains, because our society is no longer poor...
...Production is no longer urgent to satisfy wants but wants are urgent to provide employment...
...But in one of his best chapters, he shows that the condition of the poor, who are in a minority in our Affluent Society, cannot be alleviated by increasing aggregate output...
...Just as his proposals for economic security will exasperate conservatives, so Galbraith's suggestions to use the sales tax to redress the balance between privately produced goods and public services will disturb liberals...
...Sauk Centre, Minn...
...Latin American Liberties Dear Sirs: Herbert Lehman, in his admirable "Challenge to American Liberals" in the July Progressive, urges "the need to develop an imaginative and integrated set of policies toward the peoples and governments of Asia and Africa...
...Serious thought should also be given to make the life of the worker on the job more livable...
...In short, if productivity is not the paramount goal, "compassion, individual happiness, and well-being, the minimization of community or other social tensions" become the ends of society...
...Instead, he suggests simply that society should secure to all who need it the minimum income essential for decency and comfort...
...Furthermore, Galbraith maintains that this system of unemployment compensation will also make it possible normally to hold production below capacity in order to prevent inflation...
...Galbraith has done a good job of cleaning the Augean stables...
...It is no accident that the measures necessary to do this are exactly those needed to achieve social balance...
...Galbraith is deeply concerned with how our society can become sane and compassionate...
...Senator Lehman is a mature liberal, a man of vast understanding, and he has portrayed well the plight of liberalism in this materialistic, conformist age...
...Lehman as engaged in "the propagation and support of liberal ideas and principles" there be added the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom...
...Galbraith destroys this myth of consumer supremacy by showing that desires are imposed upon the consumer...
...There is such need also for Latin America...
...He admits, however, that this proposal is beyond reasonable hope of acceptance...
...it is affluent...
...Evaluation of the opportunities that the modern corporation affords the people who comprise it for dignity, individuality, and full development of personality should be as important as estimates of its economic efficiency...
...Unless there is a change in the attitude of our people, the ideology that was responsible for the position of this nation in the family of nations will be on the downward road...
...The machine should be tailored to the needs of the worker rather than the worker to the machine...
...Wants for goods must constantly be stimulated and even created by making their possession an obsession nourished by all the arts of modern advertising and salesmanship...
...The conventional answer to this criticism is that the only indication of what society needs is what the individual consumer wants and the only index of what he wants is what he is willing to pay for...
...Our dangers are more from within than from without and a United States that is more interested in maintaining the status quo than adhering to the principles that brought us into being will be on the downward slide...
...Substitutes should be found for routine and repetitive manual labor...
...To read it is to acquire an understanding of the realities of American economic society and a new vision of its possibilities...
...In any case, Galbraith suggests, alternatively, that selective price and wage controls be used to prevent inflation...
...Galbraith does not deny that downturns in economic activity still threaten the individual's economic security...
...Inflation is a constant threat...
...It must be its heritage from Bob LaFollette and George Norris...
...The IADF links democratic forces in the Western Hemisphere, exposes violations of human rights in Latin America, offers advice to officials of the government of the United States and to democratic governments in Latin America, presents protests and suggestions to the United Nations and to the Organization of American States, presses for justice in individual cases of violation of human rights...
...Most of the book is devoted to criticism of the prevailing ideas and analysis of their consequences in action...
...Economic Realities The Affluent Society, by John Kenneth Galbraith...
...For opposite reasons, conservatives object to the liberal program and offer sales taxes...
...In fact, he warned of the approach of the current depression before it became visible to all...
...It has solved "the economic problem" by producing enough to provide food, clothing, shelter, and a minimum of security in sickness and old age for the great majority of people...
...Galbraith does not blink the fact that the poor are still with us...
...Houghton Mifflin...
...Its headquarters are at 67 West 44 St., New York 36...
...However, unlike the socialist, Galbraith is convinced that our new problems, like the old problems of production, can be solved within the framework of our existing system of capitalist ownership...
...Edith Hansen Upper Darby, Pa...
...But he thinks it is wrong to permit social balance to be sacrificed if it cannot be made an instrument for reducing inequality...
...Yet it is precisely this pressure to push the output of material goods to higher and higher levels in order to provide employment that causes, according to Galbraith, peculiar difficulties for the Affluent Society...
...So, the progressive income tax should be viewed frankly as a device for lessening inequality...
...Our problem is no longer how much we produce but what we produce...
...Lehman Challenging Dear Sirs: Herbert H. Lehman's article, "The Challenge to American Liberals," in your July issue should be read by every thoughtful individual...
...Our economy, Galbraith says, "is geared to the least urgent set of human wants...
...His book goes far to show that we can achieve this humane goal if we have the will...
...His meaning is always clear, and his dry and ironic humor not only enlivens difficult passages but communicates illuminating insights...
...It is Galbraith's contention that the basic ideas of modern economics are largely irrelevant for the solution of current economic problems...
Vol. 22 • August 1958 • No. 8
