John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society asked a question that still matters: how can we live with private luxury alongside public squalor? In this video, I explore why Galbraith was right about how markets manufacture wants, and why public goods are neglected. From billionaire rockets to broken hospitals, his warning is as urgent today as it was in 1958.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
In the 1970s, as a teenager, I read John Kenneth Galbraith's book, The Affluent Society. You can see how old my copy is. You can see the colour of the spine. And to my surprise, there, tucked inside it, is a picture of my girlfriend from my school days. I wonder where she is now. That's nearly 50 years ago. But this book shaped my thinking at the time, and it has done ever since.
JK Galbraith, known as Ken to his friends, asked a critical question. He asked, "If affluence produces private luxury alongside public squalor, what does that say about our society?" That's the idea that I want to explore today.
Galbraith mattered. I think Galbraith was the second most important economist of the 20th century, after John Maynard Keynes. An extraordinary man. A man who ran the production of all wartime goods in the USA in the 1940s, when he would hardly have reached the age of 30.
By 1958, he was back as an academic, and he warned that whilst consumer goods were multiplying, public services were already decaying in the country that he was dedicated to, the USA.
As he noted markets can meet wants that can be paid for, but they don't meet social needs, which people haven't got the capacity to pay for, either, because they are literally for social benefit, and therefore no one person can identify the cost to them of making their contribution, or because people won't vote for the political parties that want to achieve that goal.
That insight still resonates - more today than ever - because what it mocks is the very concept of what affluence is in a society that worships wealth above all else.
The tyranny of private consumption was what Galbraith was really talking about. He noticed the explosion of consumer goods consumption in postwar America. It is what made Americans feel good about themselves in the 1950s and onwards, as home ownership and car ownership expanded enormously.
But at the same time, public schools, roads and public spaces were starved of resources. The market prioritised the rich over the needs of society.
We see this in exactly the same way today. We get rockets for billionaires and broken hospitals for everyone else.
What Galbraith described was 'the manufacture of wants' in the society in which he lived. He described this as a 'dependence effect'. Demand is created, but it is not necessarily natural for many of the things that we consume.
He discussed, in ways that still resonate with me, the role of advertising in creating insecurity to sell products. Consumption is, as a consequence, endless because our dissatisfaction is made to be endless as well.
But at the same time, real needs, tackling the housing crisis, climate change and poverty, are pushed aside. There is in this system of manufactured wants a neglect of public goods.
The markets ignore clean air, safe streets, and culture. The government is told to cut, privatise and outsource. The result is that private gyms and malls expand, but parks and public services decline.
Public squalor is systemic and not accidental in this system. It is a part of the political economy of neglect, and that is a term that Galbraith would undoubtedly have recognised.
The wealthy insulate themselves with private services. At the same time, they resist taxation and undermine public goods because political elites funded by the wealthy reinforce this narrative, so taxes are cast as theft and not as investment in communities.
Does Galbraith's warning matter? Now, my argument is that, of course, it does.
Climate breakdown requires massive public investment.
Ageing societies demand universal care systems, or we will have people dying in poverty and suffering.
Inequality requires redistribution and strong public institutions to enforce it, and yet we are told the money is not there while the affluent's yachts get ever larger.
We have to answer the Galbraith question, which is, " How do we live with ourselves and our affluence when we simultaneously have this public squalor?"
The answer is that we have to rebuild those public goods on which we all depend: health, education, housing, and infrastructure.
We have to tax excess, whether that be wealth or inheritance or speculative finance.
And we have to challenge the narratives of advertising. I'm not saying that there aren't things that we need and want in our society, but we do have to challenge exploitation in all the forms in which it arises, and some of that is via the advertising industry.
And we have to redefine prosperity. We must measure success not by the amount of wealth that any one individual has, but by the strength of the commons, and that is the cultural and natural resources that are accessible to everyone, including the natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth, all of which are now challenged in the UK and elsewhere.
Private affluence and public squalor are two sides of the same coin in a neoliberal society. Markets feed one, and they neglect the other.
A society that lets its public realm collapse cannot endure, and that is precisely where we are.
And that is precisely what the public also knows now. They can see that this is happening. That is why they are angry with those neoliberal parties who have put us into this position, because none of them listened to the warning that Galbraith gave so very clearly in this very pertinent book.
Our choice is now between private wealth or shared dignity. Galbraith's challenge remains, and fascism is no answer to any of this.
So what would you prefer?
Would you prefer to see the accumulation of private wealth by a few or shared dignity for everyone?
Would you rather that the government act in our common interest or to benefit a few?
There's a poll down below. Let us know.
Poll
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Certainly he and Keynes stand out. Indeed, for “Quotability” Galbraith probably edges it…. so many great one.
My favoutite?
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” ~ John Kenneth Galbraith
🙂
In Cockney rhyming slang bread and honey =money.
Another good quote is Man does not live by bread alone.
In 1930 Keynes predicted that by now most people in the UK would be working a 15-hour week. What went wrong? Galbraith explains – by the 1950s ‘the consumer society’ was becoming evident in the US – Keynes underestimated capitalism’s need for growth despite, not because of, what’s really needed, or good for people or planet. If you are perfectly happy as you are, capitalism, via its now ubiquitous advertising, will simply insist that you are not really happy without the latest gadget or dress; if you have 10 good pairs of shoes, it will insist you need 30; if your old car is fine, capitalism will nevertheless whisper that it’s not as good as the latest model, or as having 2 cars would be; and most perniciously of all, it will persuade you that, without this or that, other people will not like you, or find you attractive. It undermines not just our public services – it undermines us.
There’s another interesting thing about Keynes’ 15-hour figure and Galbraith.s book. In the 1960s anthropologists coined the term ‘the original affluent society’, having discovered that the weekly hours ‘worked’ in extant pre-capitalist societies was in fact just… 15 hours.
Should we think of so much of the advertising we are exposed to as pollution, in the same way we can readily identify turds floating in our rivers and seas?
Might it be that Mr. Galbrath’s question makes the profound point that Neoliberalism, in practice, results in increasing (societal) disequilibrium?
It does, although in the end it leads to equilibrium – neoliberalism is killing society
This was on my parents bookshelves in my childhood and clearly either informed or chimed with their thinking – they were very anti advertising and the materialistic culture of the USA and we were never allowed itv on the television when it finally arrived. Unusually among my peers, my parents were commited socialists and I was fortunately never at odds with their politics. Both came from working class backgrounds and benefitted from the post war settlement … we lived in a council house and and I would almost certainly not have even been born were it not for the National Health which saved my mother’s life in a previous pregnancy.
I struggled with the increasing aquisitiveness resulting from the credit boom in the 80’s as I do now, with the private wealth on display amidst public squalor and need.
Personally I think I’ve become more radical in my older age but recognise that I’m a minority!
Thanks for sharing. My aoprents also hated ITV because fo the advertising – so we were never allowed children’s ITV for precisely that reason.
My old man hated TV advertising so much that he used to heckle the commercials.
When the Delsey toilet tissue ad came on, he used to shout:
“So kind to my hands!”
Perhaps we were the only family in country to do the reverse. We would interrupt our viewing of the BBC and switch to ITV for the adverts every 15 minutes.
Why? My Uncle George was an actor and was in an advert so we had to watch it as often as we could. I can’t recall what he was advertising.
🙂
Excellent.
‘the manufacture of wants’ ….. Demand is created, …. for many of the things that we consume.
e.g 1. 4x4s (Merc saw that Land-Rover was doing well from the “Range-Rover” & it was profitable & thus the whole idiocy kicked off with the USA doing its imbecilic bit: form over function, profit over emissions, the grooming of the population.
e.g 2. people on the various social platforms promoting what they do & what they buy, & people following, like lemmings.
I leave it to an artist to summarise the imbecility:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcW-BSEB3ng&list=RDOcW-BSEB3ng&start_radio=1
“Would you rather that the government act in our common interest or to benefit a few?”
Nearly everyone contributing to your blog is here because they answer yes to that question.
But it is very good that you have reminded us about Galbraith – his phrase ‘Private Affluence and Public Squalor’ goes direct to the issue – and maybe that’s precisely why its been dropped by the ruling oligarchy of media and economists over recent decades.
There is a problem with books like the The Affluent Society in that they assume that everyone who will read it will arrive at the same moral conclusion.
The fact is that that is not the case. Some could have read that book and concluded that what Galbraith was describing sounded good to them and pursued it.
Michael Lewis who wrote about the behaviour of traders in Liars Poker (1989) and The Big Short (2010) felt that far from helping to get change in the financial system, his work helped to promote it, and the get rich quick mentality seized on it.
All I have seen is the Affluent Society actually shrink and become more and more concentrated – indeed you could say that affluence – the promise of capitalism to the whole of society – has effectively been privatised.
But what would one expect when much of capitalism is really nothing more than legalised theft?
I’d forgotten Galbraith! You raise a number of really important points, Richard. We can’t help living with ourselves in this inequality. (Back on my hobby horse of cognitive dissonance!) The wealthy neither see nor care, because they don’t have to. There is no longer any moral imperative to share, and certainly no public shaming of those who hoard wealth. On the contrary.
The very wealthy “donate” to political parties, rather than their communities, because they don’t live in communities as we understand them. Their “communities” are gated and sterile, immunised against poverty. The current Government was and is paid by the wealthy to serve their interests and allow them access to the inner sanctum of policy making.
The impoverished might see and care, but can do nothing. Despite the now commonly-held view that poverty is a lifestyle choice and crippling ill health a myth created to scrounge from “hard working people”, poor families are frightened and in debt, and sick people terrified of destitution. They cannot fight back. They have nothing left to fight with.
We, in the middle, see and care, but are almost as impotent. We are fragmented (probably by design) Ironically, you could say that we’re in the worst of all worlds – enough to live on, with social consciences and empathy, seeing and feeling the ghastliness, but no power and no platform.
Somehow, voices like yours/ours must catch the inevitable societal disintegration and keep people together. Hold them safe while we give them hope. A Project 2025 in reverse, if you like. Gather people from outside Parliament who see what’s happening: the Zack Polanskis of this country. The Richard Murphys.
Make a plan. You (disguised as ChatGPT) identified how to do it.
So let’s do it.
“Socialism doesn’t mean taking wealth from those who work hard and giving it to those who don’t. You’re thinking of capitalism”
Many thanks
Galbraith’s wisdom was delivered to people 67 years ago and what have those in charge done with it? Not very much. In fact, I’d wager that his ideas are barely mentioned in university Economics lectures today. The people in charge don’t want to know because they see their own demise if such ideas take a hold in the mainstream. I was listening to Bob Dylan’s protest songs at the time I was reading Galbraith and most of Bob’s words have also brought less social justice in the future than I had expected as a young man.
Maybe true
But I still live in hope