At the recent Republican convention, Senator Barry Goldwater varied the occasion’s ritual excoriation of Democrats by accusing them of having abandoned Jefferson and Jackson in favor of: “Bowles, Galbraith, and Reuther.” And the country’s newspaper columnists—with James Reston of the New York Times in the lead—have been telling us for some time now that Professor John Kenneth Galbraith’s intellectual labors will surely exert great influence on future Democratic policies. A major political impact, in fact, has been ascribed to Galbraith’s The Affluent Society by the cognoscenti; a fresh look at this 1958 bestseller may therefore be in order—quite apart from its intrinsic interest.

Recently, too, Professor Galbraith has brought out The Liberal Hour,¹ a book less ambitious than The Affluent Society, but no less entertaining. Contrary to what the title may suggest, The Liberal Hour does not offer a political program but a string of essays ranging from “Economics and Art” to “Was Ford a Fraud?” They show Galbraith at his best: a deft and clever writer, full of erudite biases, and never dull. But the more political his biases become, the less they bear serious examination. Thus, in the most programmatic of the present essays, we are told that “ Inflation . . . is not without conservative appeal,” though it is no secret that the conservative right (Republicans, Tories, French rightists) always has been less tolerant of inflation, and more of depression, than the liberal left (Democrats, Laborites, French Socialists), which has traditionally been more sensitive to depression than to inflation. Sometimes, apparently, Galbraith writes more as a Democrat than a historian or economist; at other times, he seems to write purely as a Galbraithian—for example when he proposes government price control of our big industries as the foremost remedy for inflation: Galbraith was in charge of price control during the war and has had a weakness for it ever since—not shared, to my knowledge, even by his fellow Democrats.

In fairness, however, it must be said that The Affluent Society (on which The Liberal Hour rings but few minor changes) pays little tribute to partisan politics. To be sure, Galbraith endears himself to Democrats by arguing vigorously for more government spending and more government services. But he also has the courage—some may say the gall—to propose more taxes and, above all, an increased sales tax—which has a far greater appeal for Republicans than for Democrats. Obviously, The Affluent Society has been more widely accepted than examined—particularly by the politicians. Possibly The Affluent Society is politically more important for the image it has created than for what it actually says.

Yet, The Affluent Society deserves careful examination, for it is an ambitious attempt to deal coherently with a major problem always endemic, and now quite acute, in American society: what to do with our affluence—ultimately, what values to live by. But though concerned with this problem, Galbraith resolutely refuses to face it. This may be one reason why what he has written—always in a polished and amusing style—is best described as a lucid muddle: the whole is far from coherent, though all the arguments are brilliantly put, most of them make sense, some are right—and none lead to Galbraith’s conclusions. So successfully is the essence of the problem evaded, that Galbraith has remained under the impression he is defending the liberal position when he has abandoned it altogether; abandoned it to crown the government—which he deludedly sees as an alter ego of his—philosopher king.

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The Affluent Society culminates in proposals to increase sales taxes to the end that a greater proportion of the national income be spent by the government. Galbraith feels that it would be all right to reduce purchases by individuals—particularly in the middle and lower income groups—by socializing more of their income, for they spend it foolishly and wastefully for things they don’t actually need but are made to buy by shrewd advertising. Thus, if the “imbalance” between (needed) public and (unneeded) private spending were corrected through higher sales taxes, everybody would be better off.

“Imbalance” sounds as though something were dangerously and demonstrably wrong. But, though it is often tellingly illustrated, no specific meaning is given to this “imbalance”—not to speak of any evidence that it exists. What distribution would “balance” private and public expenditure? At present more than a quarter of our national income is spent by the government. The percentage has been rising; so has expenditure on such items as public housing—units have increased from about 61 thousand in the 1940’s to about 444 thousand in the 1950’s; highways—from 2 billion to more than 8 billion; education—from 2.8 to 16.8 billion; and public parks and recreation—from 162 to 635 million. One can discuss such expenditures and needs on their separate merits. But how is a general “balance” between private and public expenditure found? While personal income after taxes has multiplied by a little less than five times since 1927, and state and local government income by a little more, the federal government’s income over the same period has increased more than twenty-fold. This increase in government revenue may be too little, as Galbraith maintains—or too much, as others feel. Unless some standard of “balance” between public and private expenditure is supplied, Galbraith’s view that there is an “imbalance” owing to low taxes is as good as but no better than West-brook Pegler’s view (or Colin Clark’s) that there is an “imbalance” owing to high taxes.

Galbraith is a gifted phrasemaker. He labels pre-Galbraith economic theories “the conventional wisdom” and thus makes them sound faintly ludicrous; worse, he finds them “pessimistic”; who wants to be pessimistic and conventional? It does not come as a surprise that “the conventional wisdom” turns out to be “obsolete” because based on a “scarcity” which now has been replaced by affluence. The rhetoric—brilliantly loaded phrases floating in an elegant air of disdainful omniscience—is so persuasive that any proof seems redundant. Which is fortunate because none is forthcoming.

The Affluent Society starts with an extended and colorful polemic against the obsolete pessimism of the classical economists, a polemic based largely on an implicit play on such words as “scarcity.” To the economist, “scarcity” means the existence of demand: a desire for goods and services great enough for people to give up something to get them, i.e. to pay a price. In this sense—the sense in which “the conventional wisdom” uses it—“scarcity” is clearly with us. To the layman, however, “scarcity” suggests shortages, insufficiency, and dire poverty, all of which have nearly disappeared among us. Much of the impressiveness of the charges against the obsolete pessimism of economists rests on a confusion created in the reader’s mind between these two meanings of “scarcity.”

The disappearance of “scarcity” in the sense economists use the term (but not the disappearance of “scarcity” as non-economists use the word) would inaugurate the millennium; we could stop worrying about economic growth, about efficiency and productivity. Galbraith—a victim, I’m afraid, of his own way with words here—comes near advocating as much: he feels that “our preoccupation with production in other words may be a preoccupation with a problem of rather low urgency.” His feeling is not shared by the Democrats, who complain bitterly (if on rather slender evidence) that production has not increased as fast as when Truman was President. And Professor Seymour Harris (whom Galbraith calls “the most diligent and useful of all economists”) relentlessly upbraids the Republicans because he thinks they treat increases of production “as a problem of rather low urgency”—just as Professor Galbraith wants them to.

If the actual content of The Affluent Society is less relevant to politics than the politician’s image of the book, the author certainly has made no move to correct the image. Perhaps he now realizes—as do politicians of both parties—that Americans desire more goods rather than more leisure at this time. As for the rest of the world, it needs more goods—and we need it. Galbraith’s view that “production and productivity become less and less important” seems not only fanciful but also frivolously parochial. It may have had an oblique appeal, though, to our self-doubts. Preachers, Calvinist and Thoreauean, have often told us that we should set less store by earthly goods—an unexceptionable sentiment which we tend to honor in the breach. Galbraith came along and insisted that we don’t really want the earthly goods we produce and buy; this may have appealed to us because we guiltily felt that we shouldn’t want them. Though people may not act as they are preached to, they think they should, and enjoy the sermon; perhaps it is cathartic; and we would no more object to a pious sentiment than we would advocate sin—though we do commit it.

Nonetheless, people strain to earn money so that they may spend it. And they clearly are not enthusiastic about curtailing their ability to purchase in favor of the government. Unwilling bluntly to tell them that they should mend their sinful ways—religious and moral values are best accepted today if disguised as science—Professor Galbraith offers a neat pseudo-scientific explanation for our seeming to want what he thinks we don’t actually want. His theory has the further advantage of absolving us from all responsibility for our sinful desires.

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The “dependence effect” is introduced into “the economics of affluence” to explain why people buy things they don’t actually desire: producers “contrive” demand through planned obsolescence and, mainly, advertising; they no longer sell products that are spontaneously demanded by consumers; they first produce the desires they then fulfill.

Now this argument—whether or not it is correct—is not necessary to sustain Galbraith’s conclusions. Even if consumer desires are quite spontaneous, they may be less important than public expenditures. This is so in war and may well be so in peace. Nor is the argument sufficient: if consumer desires are “contrived,” it does not follow that they are unimportant, or that public expenditures would be less “contrived,” or more important, or less wasteful. Finally, if advertising is both bad and effective, I should have expected proposals to reduce and restrict it, perhaps to direct and control it. But Galbraith does not propose to do so. Instead, he wishes to diminish people’s ability to respond to advertising—though this would frustrate everybody quite unnecessarily.

Granted that advertising produces the demand the advertised products satisfy, it is of doubtful relevance to the conclusion that we should reduce the production of consumer goods. But is the premise true? Perhaps John’s desire for Mary was “contrived” by Mary who wiggled by suggestively, advertising all she had to offer and more. Does this make his desire less genuine? Should it be frustrated simply because it has been stimulated? To be sure, if John had never seen Mary, he would not have desired her; but would he not have cared for any girl? Even if, without Mary, John had been entirely devoted to intellectual pursuits, would that have made it possible to force Galbraith on him—and make Mary unattainable? How, incidentally, is the desire for Galbraith stimulated? Is it spontaneous? Or has advertising something to do with it? In short, are all “contrived” desires bad—including the desire for education, public works, and Galbraith’s books—or only those that Professor Galbraith disapproves of? Obviously the real problem is what desires to contrive; and to decide who shall influence the contriving and within what limits. This problem is altogether evaded if we use “contrived” as a synonym for “bad” and propose thereupon to satisfy fewer private desires—no matter which—and more public “needs.”

Long before advertising agencies started insulting the landscape, people spent money on things thought frivolous by moralists. It might be argued that those people were not as affluent as we are. True. But the ones among them who were—the noblemen, politicians, and rich merchants of ancient Rome, of the Middle Ages, and of the Renaissance—spent their income on things no less remote from “needs” than the items on which we spend ours. (If the “imbalance” between public and private expenditure is measured by public welfare expenditures, it appears to have been greater in the past.) And, in all likelihood, the rich once spent a greater proportion of their incomes on “unneeded” things than they do now—although, if the effects of advertising were what Galbraith supposes them to be, our millionaires would be spending more on luxuries than men ever spent in the past. To the contrary, the very rich seem to live in a far more modest style than ever before: among them especially, conspicuous consumption is no longer very fashionable. But others, who in the past hardly ever could afford to buy anything not required for their bare subsistence, now can and do. Since they are not accustomed to spending, they rely on advertising and other forms of guidance for suggestions. It doesn’t follow that without advertising they would not spend their money at all. Here the Calvinist ancestry of Galbraith’s beliefs becomes obvious, and it may not be amiss to point out that Geneva was a very dull and unpleasant place when dominated by these beliefs.

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Most people in the past admired and vicariously enjoyed the display of the few who could afford it; apparently they felt represented by the rich whose luxury seemed a comfort as well as a contrast to their own narrow circumstances. (Occasional present celebrations of the British monarchy testify to some survival of this sentiment.) In this country, however—and elsewhere, too, in increasing measure—people soon came to prefer direct to vicarious enjoyment, at least of material facilities and pleasures. Though few can afford the palaces millionaires used to have—and the millionaires themselves have given many of them to universities—vast numbers now can manage to watch TV in suburban houses, and to travel around in cars. It is this use of their affluence that Professor Galbraith finds frivolous and trivial—which it certainly is. Yet, is it really more trivial or less spontaneous than the millionaires’ yachts? And is the alternative proposed by Professor Galbraith—enforced idleness; and still more government expenditure on still more elaborate schools, parkways, and public buildings—actually more satisfying, more necessary, or in any way better? Rather than damning Madison Avenue, and reducing individual incomes, should we not try to persuade people to spend money in more lastingly beneficial ways? Might we not ask whether the guidance advertising gives could be more informative? or whether less of it might be better? whether other types of guidance might be made available?

Apologists for Madison Avenue have long maintained that without it the wheels of industry would stop turning. The public takes to the idea—which is one reason why Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders and The Affluent Society became bestsellers. We love to be told that our silly purchases are the fault of cunning advertisers. It makes us feel less guilty and less silly. It allows us to eat our cake and pretend that we really don’t want it. Advertisers, of course, like to take credit for sales. And social scientists are impressed enough when consumers delightedly squeal: “the wicked advertising men are seducing us,” to solemnly attest that a sort of statutory rape is taking place. Romantics to a man, the social scientists seem ready to believe in the original chastity of consumers corrupted by advertising—as Rousseau’s noble savages were by civilization.

I share Professor Galbraith’s distaste for the things people buy. I don’t like tail-finned automobiles and I think we have too many cars, even without fins. But I do not think that advertising imposed the fins any more than it imposes compact cars, or for that matter, cars in general. (The ineffectiveness of advertising in these respects is no reason, of course, for not taxing it—whether it is a wasteful nuisance or an influential one. At present it is actually subsidized.)

Yet nobody is seduced unless he wants to be. People do not become obese because of food advertisements or slender because of reducing-cure advertisements. The cause of promiscuous, greedy, and ultimately unsatisfying purchases lies deeper. For the goods purchased seldom bring the promised happiness—not even the promised prestige (too many others get them). Just as people do not over-eat because of food, so they do not over-buy because of goods—let alone advertisements for them. Both actions spring from a feeling of dissatisfaction and emptiness. They are symptoms, not causes.² Today, people distract themselves by buying and with the mass media; just as in other times and places they tried to distract themselves in other ways—Roman circuses, 18th-century bear-baiting—which can hardly seem more reasonable to the puritanical tastes of the earnest social worker Galbraith turns out to be.

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If people spend their money in ways that do not satisfy them—let alone Professor Galbraith—should the government spend it for them? What reason do we have to believe that the government will fulfill real needs rather than public needs even less real than the private ones Professor Galbraith deplores?

What are the public needs that should be satisfied by curtailing the purchasing ability of private persons? Here imagination fails Galbraith and he offers a string of politically acceptable but hoary clichés. We ought to spend more on roads, he feels. I suspect that to do so may abet the curse of congestion more than it would remedy it: the more roads we build, the more automobiles we get. At any rate, Professor Galbraith is surely wrong in thinking that road building suffers because there is little pressure behind it, in contrast to automobile building. It is the automobile lobby that presses for more and more roads—and it is one of the strongest lobbies in federal and local government. I wish it were less effective: additional roads do little to relieve congestion, while they destroy much housing, much natural beauty, and many of the features that make cities attractive. The amount spent on road building would be much better spent on railroads and subways.³ And such simple and eminently sensible proposals as getting landlords to plant trees before their buildings and getting manufacturers to equip cars with anti-pollution devices are not even mentioned. Perhaps because these would not be public expenditures?

Galbraith feels most strongly perhaps about increasing expenditures on public education, which he contends have been neglected in favor of private expenditures on unnecessary consumer goods. The idea, of course, is very popular. Its popularity is partly owing to the education lobby (not by any means as weak as Galbraith wishes us to think) and partly to the widespread belief in education as a secular religion, as the sovereign remedy for all the evils that beset us. This is not the place to discuss the matter fully. But a few figures will refute the wild assertions about “neglect.”

Expenditure per pupil (in dollars of constant purchasing power) has risen from $40 in 1900 to $268 in 1956. There are many reasons for this, such as a relatively greater enrollment in high schools, smaller classes, more equipment, and not least, higher incomes for teachers (and other not so good reasons). Teachers’ incomes may still be low, but they have gone up more since 1929 than those of workers, government employees, lawyers, or dentists. All this hardly bears out the contention that we have stinted on education. For that matter, the percentage of our national income spent on education is greater than the comparable percentage spent by any other country about which the relevant statistics are available (as they are not, unfortunately, about the Communist countries). Most important in Galbraith’s terms, public school expenditures as a percentage of the total spent in personal consumption of goods have steadily increased (from 3.1 per cent in 1929 to 4.3 per cent in 1956). Far from increasing personal consumption and neglecting education, we have increased expenditures on education more than expenditures on consumers’ goods.

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All this is by no means conclusive. To decide whether more or less should be spent on education, one would have to consider the merits of particular expenditures. My own impression is that not even doubling our expenditures would be likely to improve the quality of our education. What is wrong is not that too little is spent but that it is spent foolishly. Actually, classes in mathematics cost less, not more, than classes in driver education. We will get more and better teaching if we don’t insist on education courses which will drive any halfway intelligent person insane with tedium and futility. And so on. Money is not the cure, and might even make matters worse.

However much we spend, it seems most unlikely that schools can fulfill Galbraith’s hopes: “The social, athletic, dramatic, and like attractions of the school . . . together with the other recreational opportunities of the community, minimize the tendency to deliquency.” It’s sweeping, people love to believe it, it’s politically acceptable. But, as Paul Goodman has pointed out in this magazine, the causes of delinquency lie deeper. And the increase in delinquency comes as schools engage in more of the activities Galbraith extols. There were fewer such activities and perhaps less delinquency in 1900. Not that delinquency is caused by athletics. It just isn’t remedied by it. More creation and less recreation, more actual study and less busywork might help more. Possibly delinquency is even furthered by our insistence on keeping unwilling pupils in school long after they have ceased to profit from it, and preventing them from working. Involuntary infantilization may propel some into delinquency as a perverted way of asserting manhood and independence.

One of Galbraith’s schemes to increase public spending does display imagination. I can find nothing else in its favor. It may have political appeal—though double-edged, at that. And if delinquency has something to do with lack of meaningful work—as Goodman maintains—no better way to foster it could be found. Galbraith proposes greatly to increase unemployment compensation per head in times of major unemployment (so as to almost reach normal income from wages) while leaving the compensation as it is now in times of reasonably full employment. He reasons that union pressure for higher wages under full employment is irresistable, and leads to inflation, which can be checked only by a government policy which creates unemployment. He advocates a fiscal policy which would create this unemployment. Since the unemployed thus are the victims of the need to check inflation, and could not possibly find jobs, they should be well compensated.

Now, Galbraith’s assumption seems unduly pessimistic. As Germany, Italy, and, to a lesser degree, England, France, and the United States have shown in the last few years, we can avoid inflation without creating unemployment. One may also wonder why, if the use unions make of their power is at fault, and if they ultimately hurt both workers and the economy as a whole, we must take for granted its irresistibility. Would it be impossible to check unions? And are they necessarily that blind? There may be political difficulties, of course. Are these greater than those that would hinder the acceptance of the proposed flexible unemployment compensation scheme? There are technical points, too. Would the reduction of production owing to unemployment combined with the high consumption level of the unemployed whose income in scarcely diminished under the scheme, not be inflationary? How would these unemployed be lured into work unless wages are increased—which, of course, would be inflationary—so as to make it worth their while to go back to work. Or are they to be permanently unemployed? If so, they would surely contribute to wage inflation.

Technicalities aside, I think Professor Galbraith’s intention “to have [in unemployment compensation] a reasonably satisfactory substitute for production as a source of income” is important. It means baldly that he thinks we should produce less, and that the producing part of the population should support in style people who are kept idle for no reason other than to reduce production and keep prices in check. I can see no economic merit in this proposal and I find no moral justification for it. It is hard not to conclude that Professor Galbraith opposes what may or may not be private waste only because he wishes to impose what is certainly public waste. The social and psychological effects of the public waste he advocates seem to me much worse than the effects of the private waste he deplores.

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When his ungrateful daughters insisted that he did not need his courtiers, King Lear rightly, though in vain, entreated:

“Oh, reason not the need. Our basest
    beggars
Are in the poorest things superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature
    needs,
Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s.”

Turning directly to Regan, Lear averred:

                        “Thou art a lady.
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous
     wear’st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. . . .”

Shakespeare clearly thought Lear’s daughters cruel in not fulfilling a need that was not in the least physical, that was acquired and social. Now, we might well reflect on the process by which such needs are created. It would be irresponsible not to consider how this process and what it creates might be influenced so that such needs might be acquired as enrich our culture when fulfilled. But to simply tell us that “contrived,” i.e. most, needs should be dispensed with because created by Madison Avenue is to evade reflection in favor of clichés. The Taj Mahal and Versailles were contrived long before advertising. We need not less “contriving” but contriving of better things.

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The needs or appetites which most demand curbing now have little to do with Madison Avenue. People do not have children because of advertising. Yet we might well try to persuade people to have fewer children for, at less than present rates of increase, the United States’ population will equal the total present world population two hundred years from now. Technological progress might enable us to support such a population. But rivers and lakes, let alone fields and forests, will be covered by human structures. All America will look like Detroit. Not too pleasant a prospect. Transferring expenditure from individuals to the government is likely to make matters worse—the government is subsidizing and encouraging procreation even now. We must endeavor to make people bear the full cost of their actions—and not to subsidize them unless they actually are socially useful. There is no point in curbing private appetites only to socialize them and satisfy them with public money.

Not a general sales tax and an increase in the tax level, but high taxation on socially costly expenditure is needed. Not more roads but high taxes on cars, particularly in cities. Above all, a high tax on advertising. Unlike Professor Galbraith, I cannot ascribe to advertising the many evils that beset us but, unlike him again, I propose to tax it because its social usefulness is in no proportion to its social cost; and it supports the mass media—of which the same must be said. Taxes on advertising should be graded so as to make it most expensive when it is socially least useful or most noxious. (I can only suggest the principle here.) For while most advertising is irrelevant and some is misleading, it can be occasionally informative and help new firms or products. But I see no point in the public at large supporting Time magazine by paying for the ads (or, for the uneconomic postal rates). Time readers are well enough off to pay for their reading. And if people are unwilling to buy magazines when they have to pay the full cost directly—as they do with books—then perhaps the magazines aren’t worth it. Or, we might have fewer mass-circulation and more little magazines (they seldom get much advertising revenue), which might be better anyway. In general, media ought to be directly supported by listeners, viewers, and readers.

If periodicals, newspapers, and TV were not subsidized by consumers who pay for the ads, their great relative advantage over books, theaters, etc., which are not so subsidized, would disappear. And why should TV viewers not pay directly rather than through everybody’s contributions to the revenue of the firms that advertise their products on TV? Direct pay TV would split the mass TV audiences into numerous small ones. Programs might be improved by being less homogenized. And if the total amount of prefabricated noise now relentlessly directed at our senses were reduced by such things as a tax on advertising, we might be able again to listen to each other. Our sensibilities may be reawakened and things may regain some of the meaning drowned out by the incessant bellowing. At worst, no harm would be done. And perhaps the rate of cultural erosion can be slowed.

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We are already rich beyond the dreams of avarice. And the Midas touch of our technology promises untold further wealth to all of us. Must we be as boundlessly greedy and witless as King Midas was? Must we create wealth by processes, and in ways, which will destroy our ability to use and enjoy it?

As I have tried to show, Galbraith’s proposals—produce less; spend less; let the government spend more—would not solve our problem, the problem of persuading people to produce less of the wrong and more of the right things, and, in the first place, to make them want the right things. The matter is complicated, for there clearly is much disagreement on “wrong” and “right” here even among those who might be comparatively immune to advertising. Professor Galbraith and I may agree on not liking tail-finned automobiles, but I think we should have altogether fewer cars; he thinks we should have more roads. And I don’t think we should want most of the things he wishes for. Even if Galbraith’s proposals actually could solve our problem, I should be chary of them. For to abandon the individualism which is the raison d’être of liberalism in favor of increased government domination is always dangerous, and perhaps in principle immoral even if we knew the government to be wise—and we don’t.

In a democracy, Santayana said, “people do what they wish but do not get what they want.” Matters might be worse if we followed Galbraith and allowed the government to decide what we want. God reads our heart’s desire better than we can. But it is unlikely that even a democratic government will. No collective decision can do as much justice to individuals as they can by deciding each for himself. (And most of the actual decisions in Mr. Galbraith’s scheme would have to be made administratively.) Wherever possible, individuals should be allowed to benefit from their wisdom and suffer from their folly. The mistakes they make are not likely to be worse than the government’s. And, at least, they are their own.

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¹ Houghton Mifflin, 197 pp., $3.50.

² I have tried to examine these matters at some length in The Fabric of Society, Chapter XV.

³ See my “Creating Cities for Human Beings,” American Scholar, Autumn 1959. Vol. 28, No. 4.