THE EFFLUENT ECONOMIST:

Midwife of miserabilism: How John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society - which celebrates its fiftieth birthday this year - anticipated today’s grinchy green politics. (Daniel Ben-Ami, February 2008, Spiked Review of Books)

With the experience of stagnation during the Great Depression receding from memory, this newfound confidence in growth was largely a reflection of a strong economic performance. Since the economy was already rapidly expanding, it was relatively easy to promote growth as a virtue. In addition, it should be recognised that growth was viewed as a way of replacing class conflict. One reason why growth was seen as desirable was that it was viewed as making both domestic and international conflict less likely.

At this point it is important to recognise that the most ardent advocates of economic growth were often liberals. Truman was a Democrat president and his key economic advisers were inclined towards liberalism. This is in contrast to today where the relatively few advocates of outright economic growth tend to be associated with the right. Back in the late 1940s and 1950s what could be called ‘growth liberalism’ held sway.

It was in this environment that two leading liberal thinkers with close ties to the Democrats - Arthur Schlesinger Jr (1917-2007) and Galbraith - started raising questions about growth in the mid-1950s. Schlesinger, then a Harvard historian, wrote in 1957 that liberals should shift their focus to ‘enlarging the individual’s opportunity for moral growth and self-fulfilment’. Meanwhile, Galbraith, who was of Canadian origin, testified in 1956 to the Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects, arguing: ‘Sooner rather than later our concern with the quantity of goods produced – the rate of increase in Gross National Product – would have to give way to the larger question of the quality of life that it provided.’ It was this idea that Galbraith developed in The Affluent Society.

The emphasis on production – and therefore on raising the level of affluence in society – was one of the main targets for criticism in Galbraith’s 1958 book. He argued that his book’s concern was with ‘the thraldom of a myth – the myth that the production of goods, by its overpowering importance and its ineluctable difficulty, is the central problem of our lives’.

Galbraith does not argue that production was always so unimportant. On the contrary, in earlier times he concedes it was a worthy goal. But since the 1930s he said that there had been ‘a mountainous rise in wellbeing’. Under such circumstances, in America and Western Europe at least, he argued that promoting prosperity should no longer be a priority.

Ever notice how such folk always live in the most affluent societies even though they have the mobility to live in the less?

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 9, 2008 4:02 PM