Basically a Communist

I definitely did not see this book coming. I had never heard about it before, and given the other stuff we had been reading, I was expecting more real economics stuff. Not that this is not real economics stuff, but it is definitely a little out there.

Galbraith's ideas would completely change the way everyone thinks about life. While he may try to play off his ideas as nonchalantly rational and straightforward, they are insanely radical.

His basic idea, that society should move away from the desire to produce more, is just as crazy as the Communist idea that we should move away from the concept of private property. It takes a bit of thought to really understand what the society Galbraith imagines would even be like as it is so different from our own.

To me, The Affluent Society, was more of a thought experiment than anything else. Galbraith is undoubtedly correct when he makes perhaps the most important point of the book, "production only fills a void that it has itself created" (125). I think someone may have even said this in class last week. It is strange to think about how when Apple announces the release of an iPhone, I want one so badly, but just days before I did not have any desire to have one at all; the product did not even exist. The product literally creates the demand... and this is undeniably true--not just with a few freak goods--but with probably the majority of goods consumed in the world today.

Moving on from this realization, Galbraith enters his thought experiment. We are caught in a society where there is an urgency to produce more and more to fulfill wants that grow and grow, but the two only fuel each other. What if we were to break out of this cycle?

Well, Galbraith tries to paint us a picture of what that world might look like. This would be a world where productivity and possession of material goods were not major concerns. Rather people would just be concerned with doing as they pleased.

If that means being unemployed, Galbraith is not worried about it, pay them benefits. If that means working half days, well then so be it.

I think Galbraith is correct to think that even in a society where the hard working are not compensated with more material goods, they would continue to work hard. I have often thought this of myself. That I would want to work hard to be a doctor or to help people whether I was rich as a result or not. And I think there are certainly a lot of people like that, especially if you preserve the prestige factor of high incomes and high society positions.

What I think is funny about this, is that the reason I have contemplated this question before is in consideration if Communism could ever function. Over the years, I have come to believe that Communism only works for the select few in society that are willing to work hard for the common good. In other words, to build a successful Communist society, you need to kill those that don't have this ability and brainwash children from an early age to believe that they should work for the common good. This was the basic theory behind Che Guevara's "Nuevo Hombre" concept. That a "new man" would rise that was not motivated by material gain but by serving the common good.

This new man sounds suspiciously like Galbraith's New Class to me. Really it is the same. In the New Class, people work not for material gain, but for their own pleasure. If this pleasure comes from leisure or from helping people or from achieving prestige it does not really matter. The only thing that defines the New Class really is that they have released themselves from the productivity trap. In a very big way, Galbraith's plans are the same as communism, the only difference is that the New Class has a little more flexibility in what they are allowed to be driven by than Guevara's New Man.

On a side note, it seems to me that Galbraith's society would be decidedly existentialist. Rather than the meaning in our lives being defined by the capitalist grind, each of us is really defining our own meaning for ourselves.

In any case, my overall conclusion on all this is that it is an interesting thought experiment and nothing more. It is like Communism. Yes, Communism would work if everyone could just work for the common good instead of material gain. But that isn't the case, and I am not even sure the extreme measures I suggested earlier of killing all those incapable and brain washing children would work to achieve this.

Similarly, for Galbraith's plans, you need a society in which everyone stops working for material gain. Most people are not capable of making that transition, even when it is logically explained to them. And really that's that. We can think about how cool it might be if it happened. If there was no longer a drive to produce, and subsequently no longer a desire to consume and everyone was just profoundly content in some hippy crazy world. But that is never going to happen. But cool to think about anyway...