Word: galbraithe
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John Kenneth Galbraith has become that rarest of social critics-a reformer whose new ideas are cheerfully anticipated even by people whose worldly holdings may be swept away if his programs are put into practice. In part that is because Galbraith has managed to write with wit and style about the 'dismal science ' of economics. As the eternal gadfly of American capitalism, he has also played a considerable role in popularizing once radical economic theory The Affluent Society (1958) predicted an age of private wealth and public impoverishment in the U.S. (a bit more extreme, on both counts...
Market System. For example, Galbraith persuasively argues that the currently critical problem of inflation no longer yields to traditional weapons like tax increases and tight credit. Reason...
such measures primarily affect the "market system," the collection of small retailers and individually practicing physicians, owners of car-repair shops and artists, pornographers et al., who, in a competitive system, are supposed to set prices according to what the market will bear Yet inflation, Galbraith says, is not caused by the market system, but by the far more powerful "planning system"-the big corporations that have gained near-total long-range control over their products' supplies, production, innovations, a manipulatable demand level, financing-and thus prices. In order to slow inflation caused by the planning system, Galbraith argues...
Much more than that is inescapable, if Galbraith's view of the public purpose is to be fulfilled. Unless the U.S. chooses to suffer "considerable social disorder and, on occasion, lethal damage to health and well-being," says Galbraith, the country must adopt a "new socialism." Socialism, because the private-enterprise system is no longer capable of supporting certain industries. New, because those industries are not the banks and high-technology monopolies that traditional socialists have thirsted to take over in the name of the state, but rather the housing, health and other public-purpose segments of the economy...
Stable Prices. Moreover, as Galbraith envisions things, these neglected but essential industries would be "socialized" in a fairly gentle way-something like the system that has governed...