The Affluent Society is a 1958 (4th edition revised 1984) book by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. The book sought to clearly outline the manner in which the post-World War II United States was becoming wealthy in the private sector but remained poor in the public sector, lacking social and physical infrastructure, and perpetuating income disparities. The book sparked much public discussion at the time. It is also credited with popularizing the term "conventional wisdom." Many of the ideas presented were later expanded and refined in Galbraith's 1967 book, The New Industrial State.
THEMES:
.The "central tradition" in economics, created by Adam Smith and expanded by David Ricardo and Thomas Robert Malthus in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, is poorly suited to the affluent post-World War II U.S. society. This is so because the "central tradition" economists wrote during a time of widespread poverty where production of basic goods was necessary. U.S.…
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