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• W576604460 abstract "Mike Berry The Affluent Society Revisited Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013, vi+204 pp., $82.50. J.K. Galbraith was a prominent figure in political economy for more than half a century--from the 1950's to his death in 2006. One can imagine him saying, with a veneer of characteristically self-effacing wit, 'my contributions have not been entirely negligible'. He advised Presidents and senior politicians from the Democrat side of US Politics. He was a renowned public intellectual, featuring regularly in the serious press and in the media, including his own TV series on economic ideas in historical context. He wrote over 40 books, many of which were on the bestseller lists. Of these, The Affluent Society is the most widely celebrated, having been an absolute blockbuster when it first appeared in 1958 (and probably not surpassed in this respect until Thomas Piketty's remarkable smash-hit this year). It is appropriate and timely to look back at JKG's famous work and to reflect on the lessons learned, the subsequent experiences and the equivalent political economic challenges today. Mike Berry does so with clarity and panache. For readers who are unfamiliar with Galbraith's ideas, he presents a helpful introduction to the main themes of The Affluent Society, usually as paraphrase but sometimes laced with key quotations. He is eager, however, to get on with his own interpretation of the relevance of Galbraith's main contributions. And he is by no means consistently laudatary. On page 83, for example we read: 'Looking back from today's vantage point, one would have to say that in many respects Galbraith misread the signs concerning the declining importance of production and growth'. And on page 95: 'Developments over the past few decades have generally undermined the predictions of Galbraith and Keynes on the declining urgency of consumer wants'. Overall, though, it is a empathetic assessment of Galbraith's work, not only in The Affluent Society but also in a range of his other publications up to The Good Society that Berry describes as his last major work (albeit not the very last, that being a slim, seriously witty volume on The Economics of Innocent Fraud which Galbraith wrote just two years before he died). The Affluent Society Revisited is organised around about a dozen themes. First and foremost are reflections on the power of ideas, assessing what Galbraith famously labelled 'the conventional wisdom' (i.e. not wise at all, just conventional). Then there is a return visit to 'the central tradition' of economic thought, from Smith to Keynes, in which the principal economic problem is identified as achieving economic growth without recessionary interruptions. It was his challenge to this traditional focus of economics that led Galbraith to adopt the title The Affluent Society--as a means of signalling, in effect, 'mission accomplished, but now quite different challenges ahead'. Berry then directs our attention to inequality, which has been a subsidiary or subordinate theme in economics. Of this Galbraith wrote 'few things are more evident in modern social history than the decline of interest in inequality as an economic issue' (quoted on p.31). I don't think, however, that he personally thought economic inequality to be of 'declining significance ... as an issue worthy of attention' (p.50) As Berry elsewhere notes, JKG always advocated pro-poor policies, and did so particularly prominently in The Good Society. Indeed, I think that he would have warmly welcomed Piketty's recent tour de force on inequality--notwithstanding the strong reservations about Piketty's approach that have been expressed by Galbraith's son, James K. Galbraith (discussed in Chris Sheil's article earlier in this issue of JAPE). Subsequent chapters in Berry's book draw out other prominent and celebrated Galbraithian themes--economic security, the ambiguities of production, the driving force of consumerism, the causes of inflation, the significance of debt, the theory of social balance, policies for economic reform, the importance of engaging with economic power and the question of morality in economic affairs. …" @default.
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