Quotable Galbraith

Mon, 01/05/2006 - 11:23pm — emmeline

To take up Alex’s challenge to offer some thoughts on Galbraith… I’m struck by the continued relevance of his observations. For example, The Australian quotes a passage from The Affluent Society, published in 1958, which I think speaks to the current IR debate:

The notion that economic insecurity is essential for efficiency and economic advance was a major miscalculation – perhaps the greatest in history of economic ideas – in fact, the years of increasing concern for economic security have been ones of unparallelled advance in productivity.

And in an Australia where ‘aspirational’ households carry obscene amounts of debt in order to finance their McMansions, fuel-inefficient four wheel drives and private school educations, we see parallels with Galbraith’s view of 1950s America. To quote the New York Times:

… [Galbraith] depicted a consumer culture gone wild, rich in goods but poor in the social services that make for community. He argued that America had become so obsessed with overproducing consumer goods that it had increased the perils of both inflation and recession by creating an artificial demand for frivolous or useless products, by encouraging overextension of consumer credit and by emphasizing the private sector at the expense of the public sector.

Galbraith was a strong proponent of the view that there are more important things than mere economic production, as he made clear in a recent Radio National Background Briefing: “Let us bear in mind that William Shakespeare was the product of a country with a very low Gross National Product.” And when prompted to nominate the book he was most proud of, he nominates his book on Indian Art, before conceding that, perhaps, The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State were his most influential pieces.

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emmeline's blog

adam wrote:

My favourite bit of the Background Briefing story, from Richard Parker, author of a Galbraith biography:

Now Galbraith mocked the qualities of a society that misunderstood that the real needs of American society moving forward from the 1950s, were not for bigger cars, not for bigger homes, not for more things to be privately consumed, but the construction of a public world that worked for all. A public world of public goods, of hospitals and medical systems that worked for all, of parks and recreation that were provided for all, not just education but first-rate, absolutely excellent education provided for all. These were the things that an affluent society owed itself, not more tail-fin automobiles, not the latest in avocado-trimmed refrigerators, or burnt-orange shag runs as many of you old enough to remember the ‘50s will recall.

He of course was not then writing in a period when what I find to be the most striking metaphor of this new world, had emerged. Today though, he finds it as amusing as I do, that we walk down the streets of America and encounter so many people with the same name: Calvin, Harry, Tommy Hilfinger. I had no idea there were so many Hilfingers living in the United States today. What an enormous migration of people this must have been. Here we are, as Americans, paying premium prices above the cost of the goods or the service that those goods provide, in order to serve as billboards for a corporation.

The full audio of Richard Parker’s address to the Commonwealth Club is available at their website.

Tue, 02/05/2006 - 10:51am

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