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Asia and Africa. On this assumption Galbraith's argument remains valid.
But he now advances the argument a further stage; for he goes on
to assert that the obsession with production is not merely illogical in
the affluent society, but brings in its train two major evils. (I omit a
rather dubious argument about the volume of consumer debt.)
First, the United States displays an appalling lack of balance be–
tween private goods and public goods: on the one hand, a copious pro–
fusion of cars, washing machines, deep freezes, and private swimming
pools, on the other hand a most niggardly provision of schools, play–
grounds, roads, police and mental hospitals. The result is a disturbing
incidence of crime, juvenile delinquency, accidents, congestion, urban
sprawl, ignorance and ugliness. This situation Galbraith attributes, for
a number of detailed reasons, to the preoccupation with production.
All Americans will recognize the situation thus described. But can
it be thus attributed? I am inclined to doubt it. I think rather that the
proportion of income which different countries are prepared to sur–
render to the state for communal spending is a function of essentially
noneconomic social and psychological attitudes-a tradition of strong
or weak government, the strength of individualism, the extent of the
ideology of private enterprise, psychological attitudes toward taxation,
and so on. The U.S., Germany and Sweden all attach great importance
to economic efficiency and rapid growth; yet they have quite different
attitudes to social planning and the provision of public goods. This sug–
gests that the explanation is to be looked for in the social and cultural
tradition of the country concerned, and not in its relative degree of
affluence.
In fact I agree strongly with all of Galbraith's imaginative proposals
for correcting the social imbalance in the United States; from a prac–
tical viewpoint these are perhaps the most important in the book. But
they are not, in my view, strictly relevant to his main thesis.
The second evil is inflation. Galbraith states the conventional case
for supposing that full employment inevitably entails inflation.
If
on
the other hand we could run the economy on a looser rein, allowing
some slack and unemployment, we could then achieve price stability.
But the consequent unemployment, as we saw above, would involve a
painful insecurity and loss of income. To resolve this dilemma, Gal–
braith proposes a most ingenious scheme-which might well be desirable
irrespective of this particular argument--of graduated unemployment
compensation, designed to maintain incomes during unemployment. In
this way, he argues, we should both achieve price stability, and also
neatly extricate ourselves from the absurd paradox of seeking maximum
