The Affluent Society of the 21st Century

The obituaries for J. Kenneth Galbraith, who died recently at the age of 97, mentioned his books on economics, his public service as price control czar during World War II and ambassador to India, his role as counselor to liberal presidents and would-be presidents and his support for liberal causes–and still failed to do justice to the extraordinary length, impact and variety of his life and career.

I saw no mention, for example, of The McLandress Dimension, a slim satire Galbraith wrote in 1962 under the pseudonym of Mark Epernay. The book was about a fictional McLandress Coefficient, an index created by a professor named Herschel McLandress that purported to measure public figures’ self-absorption by analyzing their speeches and conversation and determining how long they could speak or write without referring to themselves. The higher the “McL-C” (pron: mackelsee) as Galbraith abbreviated the index, the less self-absorbed the person was. The highest reported McL-C, four hours, belonged Martin Luther King, while Richard Nixon’s, three seconds, was the lowest.

But the thing I most missed in the many Galbraith appreciations I saw was any recognition that in the almost fifty years since the publication of the book that first won him wide notice, The Affluent Society, Galbraith’s characterization of the era he lived in, the 1950s, fits our debut de siecle epoch better than it did the mid-century era for which Galbraith coined the term.

The affluent society, Galbraith asserted, was really two societies or sectors, a private sector characterized by opulence and a public sector in which squalor ruled. The bifurcation, Galbraith believed, was no accident. Because private sector profits and jobs depended on continued production, private businesses, rather than responding to actual consumer needs, generated needs through advertising. But the public sector, where there were real needs like schools and libraries, could not advertise, and consequently saw its real needs neglected while the ersatz needs created by the private sector were indulged.

The private opulence that Galbraith described fifty years ago is even more evident today than it was then. We pony up $5 for a cup of coffee without thinking, much less flinching. Restaurant critics recommend dinners for two that will set the diner back $150-$200. And you can’t drive to work without seeing any number of $100,000 Mercedes and $130,000 Hummers. Does anybody think that these products and services came to market in response to consumer demand to have them as opposed to producers’ need to sell them?

Nothing captures the phenomenon more perfectly than digital television. For some years now it has been possible to buy a ± 23-inch color TV with perfectly good picture quality for $150 or less and have it last for a decade. TVs are so affordable that people can afford not just one in the living room but one for every room in the house.

Good for consumers. For TV manufacturers and sellers–well, not so much. Houses have only so many rooms. What happens when there’s a TV in every one, and people don’t need any more?

This was exactly the dilemma the auto industry faced eighty years ago. Ford Model Ts got cheaper every year and ran forever. What would happen to the industry and its employees when everybody who could afford a car had one? General Motors had an answer: Convert cars from vehicles into lifestyle statements. Bring out new models with new options every year. Convince people, in other words, that they should buy new cars even though their old ones were still running well.

The TV industry has gone the auto industry one better. Like the auto industry, they came up with a new version of their product, digital TV. Programs would be transmitted not in waves as they are now but in bits and bytes. Program producers would need new cameras and editing equipment to make these shows. Tv stations would need new transmitter to broadcast them. Families would need to buy new digital TVs (DTVs), more than ten times as expensive as the analog TVs we have now, to watch them.

But what the DTV’s improved picture quality wasn’t enough to get people to pay $2000 for what they could get for $125? What if networks and stations didn’t want to invest in the new cameras and other equipment DTV would need? Without DTV shows, nobody would buy DTVs.

Now comes the beauty part, the genius of the whole thing: Don’t allow people to make that choice. In 1996 the Federal Communications Commission issued regulations requiring stations to begin broadcasting digital signals and, within seven years, to discontinue their analog signals. All those analog TV sets in the kitchen and bedrooms and basement would become useless. People would have to buy new digital TVs or go without TV.

The cost of all these things, all this opulence, today as it was fifty years ago, is the public squalor that Galbraith identified. People who are having to spend a grand or two for–each–new TV set, will not be receptive to paying higher taxes for better schools and teachers, while existing public schools occupy buildings whose average age is pushing fifty. The $130,000 Hummer guzzles its gas as it sits in traffic jams created by the unwillingness of local, state and federal governments to fund sufficient freeway or public transportation capacity. The high public officials who decide whether or not to send the country to war earn salaries comparable to first-year associates, fresh out of law school and clerkships, at major law firms.

Do we think that the coexistence of private opulence and public squalor signifies that people naturally desire one over the other, that they prefer, digital TVs over better schools or mast transit, or that they assign a higher value to the work of first-year law firm associates than to that of the Secretary of State?

Galbraith suggested not. People are not, Galbraith suggested, “on arising each morning…assailed by demons which instill in [them] a passion” for such things as Hummers and digital televisions in quite the same way as they awake wanting food and drink. Consumers’ appetite for such expensive inessentials is driven, he asserted, by advertising. The firms that make cars, he said, also make the advertising that stimulates the desire for cars. Indeed, if it weren’t for the availability of advertising, the manufacturers wouldn’t risk even making the cars. The equality of production and advertising is illustrated by analyzing movie budgets. Sony, for instance, is said to have spent $150 million to produce Spider-Man 2, and another $150 million to advertise it.

The advertising budgets for public purposes, on the other hand, are tiny fractions of their cost of production, and the appropriations that are made available are similarly small.

Such an analysis seems to infuriate columnist George Will. In a neat piece of blame-the-victim rhetorical jiu jitsu, Will, in a column shortly after Galbraith’s death, converts Galbraith’s indictment of producers into an indictment of consumers. Galbraith may have seemed to be criticizing those who generated demand to keep the economy running, Will argues, but he was actually “disparag[ing] the competence of the average American” with a quintessentially liberal “belief that people are manipulable dolts who need to be protected by their liberal betters from exposure to ‘too much’ advertising.” Galbraith, wrote Will in a column entitled “Condescensional Wisdom”–and let’s face it, George Will knows from condescension–depicted “Americans as pathetic, passive lumps, as manipulable as clay. Americans were what modern liberalism relishes –victims , to be treated as wards of a government run by liberals.”

There is a certain ponderous quality to Galbraith’s prose, a certain archness, and a certain self-confidence–“Some may think [this book] lacking in that beguiling modesty which is so much in fashion in social comment,” he begins a section in the first chapter of The Affluent Society–that may come across to Will as condescension.

But if Galbraith’s argument condescends, it is not to American advertising-bombarded consumers, or to his readers. If Galbraith condescends to anyone it is to those, like George Will, who are so blind that they cannot see what is apparent to anyone who opens a magazine or turns on a digital television set.

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