Word: galbraith
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This thesis is not wholly new, and thus it might attract less attention if this were not a Galbraith book. He wrote one of the two or three most quoted books on economics in the past decade, The Affluent Society, and he considers that to have been only a prelude to this more comprehensive work. Ever since he broadcast chunks of it in six widely discussed lectures on the BBC late last year (TIME, Jan. 6), it has been awaited by his fans on Capitol Hill and beyond...
...Moribund Market. One of Galbraith's main contentions is that the rise of the technostructure has brought the demise of that cornerstone of capitalism, the free market. As avidly as Eastern Europe's socialists, the U.S.'s industrial organization men embrace the cult of planning, leaving very little to the chancy market. Galbraith argues that they carefully plan production, use aggressive advertising as part of that planning to bamboozle the public into buying, and are sufficiently monopolistic to "establish prices and insure demand." In the fastest-rising industries-defense, space, atomics, electronics and supersonic transport-they have...
This is not all bad to Galbraith, who has the economist's frequent bias in favor of planning and government involvement, and who would like to see more of both applied to such challenges as urban blight and health care. He is also greatly alarmed that the U.S. and other industrial societies are falling into a "comfortable servitude" by overemphasizing the quantity of production at the expense of the quality of life...
Spoon-Fed & Nose-Led. Galbraith certainly has his points. But many of them are neither original nor entirely valid. He mints a bright aphorism here and there. "Men who believe themselves deeply engaged in private thought are usually doing nothing," he writes. And again: "One should always cherish his critics and protect them where possible from foolish error." But his writing is too often didactic and his logic oversimplified...
...year than ever before), and overlooks the fact that an energetic free market rejects thousands of new products every year, despite all the elaborate plans of groupthinkers. The ornery and unpredictable consumer is not quite as easily spoon-fed or nose-led by Madison Avenue or the technostructure as Galbraith suggests...