BOO KS
613
"LAND OF PLENTY"
THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY.
By
John Golbroith. Houghton Mifflin. $4.00.
Why do we go on fussing about greater efficiency and higher
production when, in the U.S. at least, the extra output consists merely
of yet more elaborate tail fins on even longer cars, or of frippery
gadgets which we were not even conscious of wanting until we were
stimulated by high-powered advertising? It is this apparently absurd
paradox, and its causes and consequences, which form the theme of Pro–
fessor Galbraith's new book. It was natural, he argues, to be obsessed
with production in an age of poverty, privation, and hunger, when the
masses lacked even the basic necessities of life. It is ridiculous to be
equally obsessed today, when poverty hali given way to affluence, the
ordinary American citizen enjoys amenities which not even the rich
enjoyed a century ago, and marginal output consists of goods that by
any standards are patently inessential. To assert, in this condition of
opulence, that growth and efficiency are still of paramount importance
seems an oddly irrelevant notion; yet it is one which continues to form
part of the ruling American ethos.
How are we to explain this continued preoccupation with produc–
tion under such changed conditions? Galbraith suggests three reasons.
First, we are still subconsciously dominated by the ideas of the past, and
notably by the scarcity tradition of classical economics. I doubt myself
whether this hangover effect is as potent as he supposes. However, the
point is in no way essential to his argument.
Secondly, he adduces a much more subtle reason. One of the ten–
sions to which classical capitalism gave rise was the class bitterness and
sense of injustice associated with great inequalities of income. This ten–
sion has, in contemporary America, largely disappeared; and the tra–
ditional dispute over equality is in abeyance.
This is primarily the consequence of the remarkable rise in the
standard of living of the masses. Galbraith gives a brilliant exposition
of a point to which I have long attached importance in the context of
the British social system: namely, that the higher the average level of
real income, whatever its distribution, the greater the subjective sense
of social equality. A poor man will feel bitterly the contrast between his
privation and the lavish expenditures of the rich. But the American
worker today, enjoying a car, a deep freeze, and an annual holiday
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