Productivity, research, and education

In his book, the Affluent Society, Galbraith attacks conventional wisdom and its rigidity to adaptation. He further muses on the transcendental influence this wisdom has had on research and education.

As Galbraith states, most people have come to view human development as valuable for with it a society reaps the rewards of research- innovation. However, as he continues, given our society’s preoccupation with productivity, research has had a tendency to focus only on “discovering changes that can be advertised”(205). Thus, within our society, innovation is reduced to nothing more than the creation and discovery of “selling points”. Just as inadequate resources are allocated to education, so too are resources scarcely devoted to the discovery of real improvements in consumer goods. He concedes that improvements in products have not been completely absent from the U.S., however, he attributes significant innovations to government sponsored research.

Productivity has transcended as a purpose of education as well, however, education may have the propensity to hurt the current markets which run off manufactured consumer desire. While education is valuable in so far as it yields innovations that bring the crowds into rushing into Wal-Mart, it is simultaneous a threat to manufactured demand-it’s the “simple minds… [that] are the easiest to manage”(208). Education creates diversity in interest and tastes, making it difficult to herd the masses. Galbraith argues that education removes the veil from peoples eyes, allowing them “to see how they are managed in the interest of the mechanism that is assumed to serve them” (208).

While I agree that most true innovation within the product sector can be traced to some military discovery, I am not entirely convinced that education has the awesome power to free society from the influence of advertising execs or of materialistic want. If anything, the enhanced earning potential of a college graduate just gives her a greater more disposable income to buy the latest cell phone, camera, or ipod. The tastes in this case might not be as simple as: “automobiles; the uncomplicated forms of alcohol, food and sexual enjoyment…” but they are just as easily tied to synthesis and emulation.