John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Affluent Society"

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that when Galbraith wrote "The Affluent Society", in 1958, he spotted problems in American society that were caused, not by the drive that accompanies the desire to escape from need, but by the blindness that results from excessive gain. This paper points out that Galbraith promoted a version of Keynes' idea that when economic growth is inadequate, "state expenditure for useful purposes" (including a certain amount of deficit spending) was the prop the economy needed. The author states that, despite the immense popularity of the book, now in its fourth edition, Galbraith's ideas were little heeded in practical terms.

Table of Contents
Keynes' Notion of Increasing Production
Keynes and State Spending
Biography
History of the Book
Galbraith's Central Argument
Pessimism of the Central Tradition
Accommodating Inequality and Insecurity
Making Increased Production the Only Economic Good

From the Paper:

"Galbraith constructed his argument in four stages. First, he demonstrated that postwar thought about the economy depended on the essential pessimism inherited from the central tradition in economics stretching back to Ricardo in the early nineteenth century. Second, he showed how an implicit accommodation to affluence was constructed. Third, he examined how the pessimistic assumption that poverty was inevitable, "which stemmed from a world where nearly all were poor," was institutionalized in affluent America. Finally, he attempted to show how, once one escaped the grip of the conventional wisdom that inequality and economic insecurity are inevitable, it was possible to imagine alternative courses of action."

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