Rating: 
Summary: Interesting case study of a Canadian in America
Review: The Affluent Society is probably not read anymore, and for good reason, because it doesn't have a great deal to say today. It is an "intervention," as the leftists like to say, and it doesn't translate very well to very different circumstances. Just for that reason, it is a snapshot of a particularly interesting time, the late 50's, in American history. What is most interesting about the book is the aristocratic disdain he holds for large gas grills, tail fins, televisions, and advertising. The idea that growth is not organic or spontaneous but generated by advertising--the book was written at about the same time as Vance Packard was big--is repugnant to Galbraith. How frivolous! Or even worse, how trivial. Because Galbraith was part of the strategic air command and was involved in the bombing of cities in WWII, he was intimately familiar with the consequences of that campaign, and he tells a story about how production actually increased after the bombing because all the people engaged in services, like waiters and housecleaners and barbers, went into production after the city had been destroyed. (Albert Speer, who organized that production, recalls meeting his American counterpart after the war and being very impressed with his professionalism. Speer and Galbraith are very similar, no the least in their relationships with charismatic leaders.) Galbraith does not argue, as one would expect, that quality of life is largely divorced from "production"--he is all for production, so long as it involves food, housing, steel, and other essentials. What he notes, instead, is that life went on as before after all the superfluities were stripped away. If only the masses were not so stupid! If only we could maintain a war economy after the war is over: that is the implicit message of the book (and of course Galbraith would be in charge). The idea that all those factories that once produced beautiful bombers would now be producing chrome by the ton was deeply offensive to sense both of discretion--wealth is not for display--and technocratic utility: production should serve a purpose, whether it be fighting Hitler or fighting poverty. Galbraith is also a spectacularly good writer.
Rating: 
Summary: Affluent Society was a partly factual and interesting book.
Review: The Affluent Society was a term to describe the United States after World War II. An Affluent Society is rich in private resources but poor in public ones because of a misplaced priority on increasing production in the private sector. John Kenneth Galbraith argued that the U.S. should shift resources to improve schools, the infrastructure, recreational resources, and social services providing a better standard of life instead of mor and more consumer goods. The term is now used to indicate prosperity, wide spread I shouldn't tell you any more or it would spoil your experience when you read it. It was a great book. John Galbraith game some great opinions which he truly believed in. I would reccomend this book to anyone who is into American history.
Rating: 
Summary: spectacularly wrong
Review: The lesson of the whole post-Keynesian world is that governments are now responsible for economic performance. Any notion that poor performance can't be remedied by the state is a reversion to 19th-century attitudes, which I'm not prepared to accept. -John Kenneth Galbraith to Mother Jones Magazine I have always felt a certain horror of political economists, since I heard one of them say that he feared the famine of 1848 in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good. -Attrib. to Benjamin Jowett Karl Marx was so profoundly wrong about so many issues and the Left has clung to his mistakes so tenaciously that it is hard to decide which of his errors has had the most deleterious affect on human affairs. But I think it is safe to say that one of the worst ideas that he advocated, and which was swallowed whole hog by liberals, was the idea that materialism is the supreme and dertiminative motivation for human action. Thus, he proposed, all of human existence boils down to the yearning to live at a subsistence level, to be clothed, fed and housed. Now I'm not saying that these things aren't powerful motivators, I'd merely suggest that it is a failure of perspective to suggest that they are the be all and end all of life. Sure when you are hungry, feeding yourself seems like the purpose of life, but to a drowning man there's no higher purpose than treading water. Draw back from either of these immediate situations and you see that the sufferer has too narrow a perspective. However, Galbraith, who was apparently little more than a garden variety liberal with some height, some panache and a facility with the language, wrote this entire book as a protest against the growth economy, as if it is some kind of iron clad law that once men's most basic material desires are met, they are fed, clothed and housed, then their fundamental purposes in life have been fulfilled. He therefore assumes that any material consumption beyond this base level is unnatural and is created somehow by forces extrinsic to the individual and this consumption is a historical aberration that is being fostered by erroneous attitudes and insidious advertising. Moreover, since these mistaken or malicious factors can not prevail for long, eventually people will realize that they are consuming beyond their needs and they will stop. Therefore, since man, in his view, does not need more than the minimal requirements of existence and since modern society produces enough to satisfy these basic needs for every citizen, it is foolish to keep our focus on expanding the economy. Instead, we should concentrate on redistributing what we have, yadda-yadda-yadda. It is impossible to convey a sense of how incredibly misguided Galbraith's theories and his policy prescriptions have proven. Here are just a few inanities to ponder. He is totally dismissive of the idea that recipients of welfare benefits will be damaged by those very payments, scoffing at the notion that they will become dependents of the state. He concludes that, having reached the point where our needs are taken care of, modern man will necessarily do one of three things: work fewer ours and days; or work less hard; or fewer people will choose to work. He states with great confidence that operating the economy at capacity is per se inflationary, so he suggests that we build in a higher level of unemployment. He prattles on about the current imbalance between public and private production, averring that public "goods" are being neglected in favor of production of private goods. But what are these public goods? How about medicine, education, etc. ? He is so obtuse, or so trapped in a Social Welfare State mindset, that he can't even see that these too are fundamentally private goods. But perhaps the most incredible aspect of the book is his treatment of the American economy as a closed system; he never mentions our trading partners or the developing world and how they will impact the "Affluent Society". So what we have here is a clarion call for the Great Society by a man who did not perceive, or foresee such basic megatrends as: the globalization of the economy; the massive entry of women (who by his definition would seem to have been fulfilled human beings when men were taking care of them ) into the workforce; the information age; the inflationary effects of government spending; etc... But folks like JFK and LBJ listened to him and we got the Great Society at an estimated cost of $5 Trillion. Not coincidentally, the Federal Deficit today stands at $5.6 Trillion. Finally, in the past few years, we have begun to jettison Galbraithean social programs and we are running a full employment economy with zero % inflation and the deficit will be gone in ten years. I think we can reasonably state that not only was this book spectacularly wrong, it actually did real damage to the United States economy and virtually destroyed several generations of Americans who became addicted to Welfare. This one may edge out Silent Spring for the worst choice on this list (Modern Library Top 100), but the inclusion of both provides a valuable lesson about the invulnerability of liberal cant to contradictory facts and experience. GRADE: F
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