The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith

In the introduction to the 40th anniversary edition of The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith offers a mea culpa.

“On two matters this book was right, and before its time. On one, time and economic changes have shown it to be wrong. I begin with the error.

Running through the early editions of The Affluent Society was a strongly expressed warning about inflation. It was the prime threat hovering over a society of general well-being. Inflation or unemployment. This is no longer so clearly the case.” (intro)^[1]

As he is so fond of reminding us, the enemy of ideas is events rather than other ideas, and from his perspective in 1998, both inflation and unemployment were low, seemingly putting that problem to bed.

Of course, with “affordability” the centerpiece of our current political carnival, Galbraith’s initial concern with inflation seems quite well-founded, if not the specific mechanism (the wage-price spiral, wherein higher costs lead workers to demand higher wages, which in turn forces firms to raise their prices, more relevant in an era of decreased union membership) of his focus. The fact that the one position he disavowed (we will get to the successes) turned out to be perfectly sound should give a sense to the remarkable prescience of this book first published in the Eisenhower administration.

The Conventional Wisdom

“Nothing, for example, gives me more pleasure than the chapter on the concept of the conventional wisdom. That phrase has now passed into the language; I encounter it daily, used by individuals, some disapproving of my general stance on economics and politics, who have no thought as to its source. Perhaps I should have taken out a patent.” (intro)

Indeed, Galbraith is responsible for the phrase “conventional wisdom.” Much more than just a snappy turn of phrase, though, the conventional wisdom is of critical importance within his worldview. He begins with the simple but profound observation that the test which ideas are subject to in our discourse is not truth but audience approval. Now obviously people generally like to believe the truth, which is why there is little disagreement about easily observable phenomena, like objects falling to the ground when dropped, and water freezing into ice when it’s cold. However, when it comes to more complicated topics, there’s much more room for reasonable disagreement. This sphere of ambiguity gives people considerable latitude to adjust their beliefs to their preferences. A great example is religion. Obviously there’s a lot of uncertainty about the nature of God and the universe. So usually it makes sense to just go with the flow and stick with the religion you were raised in, rather than embark on a probably-doomed quest for the absolute truth. Even those supposed paragons of impartial truth-seeking, philosophers, are not immune; G. A. Cohen ponders in “Paradoxes of Conviction” whether he would’ve been on the other side of the analytic-synthetic debate had he gone to Harvard rather than Oxford.

The result is the formation of schools of thought that represent reasonable theories at a certain point in time. Now this on its own is not a bad thing, but when people become wedded to particular beliefs, it can be hard to give them up even when events decisively overtake them. Science is an example of the process functioning well. Aristotelian physicists were quick to hop on the Newton bandwagon when he demonstrated the obsolescence of their ideas, and when the next big disruption arrived with Einstein’s theory of relativity, Newtonianism was just as quickly tossed by the wayside. Nowadays, you would be hard-pressed to find someone defending the phlogiston theory of combustion.

However, in other fields the conventional wisdom can linger long past its time. Galbraith fingers economics as a prime example, and to explain why, he takes us on a brisk but enlightening tour through the history of the “dismal science.” This may sound audacious for the first third of a 263-page book, but in fact economics is quite a young field, with the first real systematization commonly dated to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, fittingly published the same year as the birth of our youthful and exceptionally wealthy nation. This period marked the beginning of the industrial age, where Europe slowly arose from its feudal millennium. This was an era where extreme poverty was the norm, individual initiative was frowned upon, and what little wealth a peasant might be able to accumulate was subject to sudden confiscation by marauding bandits and armies alike. The rich, under the auspices of the state, seized whatever was left.

Economic liberalization and technological advancement promised to ameliorate this dire situation some. And only some, was the prevailing attitude of the time. Gaping inequality was as much a fact of life as the weather. There would always be conflict between the rich and the poor, but the rich with all their advantages would inevitably prevail, and wages would adhere to David Ricardo’s “iron law”, as defined in what Galbraith terms the “most quoted passage in economic literature”:

“Labour, like all other things which are purchased and sold, and which may be increased or diminished in quantity, has its natural and its market price. The natural price of labour is that price which is necessary to enable the labourers, one with another, to subsist and perpetuate their race, without either increase or diminution.” (25)

Marx produced a shock to the system by rejecting part of this formula – that the rich would always prevail – but crucially accepted a large part of it, including the iron law. However, he was actually not the pinnacle of pessimism about capitalism. I was amused to read the views of the man Galbraith calls “the indubitably indigenous figure in American economic thought” (46), Thorstein Veblen.

“Where Marx looked forward hopefully to revolutionary reconstruction, Veblen did not. In his latter years, he comforted himself only with the thought that the evolving economic society was destroying not only itself, but all civilization as well.” (46)

I won’t go too in detail into the history, though I did find that part of the book quite valuable for my own understanding. What’s relevant to the broader argument is the gloominess that has suffused economics since its birth. This, broadly speaking, explains our strange attachment to production. For almost all of human history, the basic needs have been scarce. Markets offer a way to most efficiently allocate them, but ultimately our satisfaction is based on our efforts, and it is imperative for society to extract as much as it can from its people.

What we have failed to recognize is simply that this is no longer the case. The goods and services we produce now are mostly of much lesser importance than those our ancestors dedicated their days to. The affluent society is one in which production is simply not of paramount importance. And most remarkable of all, this analysis is equally as relevant today as it was when he wrote about it nearly 70 years ago now. Much is made about the unprecedented polarization of American society, yet (other than the odd insertion of “minimally prosperous”) this passage still largely holds up:

“On the importance of production as a test of performance, there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats, right and left, white and minimally prosperous black, Catholic and Protestant.” (99)

There are more dissenting voices today: degrowthers on the left and “trad” influencers on the right. But they remain well outside the mainstream. And I cannot stress enough that The Affluent Society was originally published in 1958. Our GDP that year was $500 billion, or about $5.7 trillion adjusted for inflation. It is now nearly $32 trillion, a sixfold increase. True, our population has roughly doubled in that time, but even accounting for this there has still been a tripling in real per-capita GDP. Has there been a corresponding tripling in quality of life? Trad-fluencers are wrong to suggest that there have been no improvements; due to medical advances life expectancy has increased by a full decade, for example. But even this is only vaguely captured in a simple accounting of production.

The point is not to say that GDP is meaningless. Far from it. Galbraith is careful to note that the Marxist general revolt was largely precluded by the rising tide lifting all boats. The massive productive gains of the Industrial Revolution benefited nearly all of society, if quite unevenly. But now that we have reached the position of affluence, it is no longer enough to simply ask how much we are making. Crucial now to future improvements is the question of what exactly we are making.

Private vs. Public Goods

In my opinion Galbraith’s most valuable contribution is his analysis of the distinction between public and private goods in the American psyche. One indelible passage captures it perfectly.

“The family which takes its mauve and cerise, air-conditioned, power-steered and power-braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards and posts for wires that should have long since been put underground. They pass on into a countryside that has been rendered largely invisible by commercial art. (The goods which the latter advertise have an absolute priority in our value system. Such aesthetic considerations as a view of the countryside accordingly come second. On such matters, we are consistent.) They picnic on exquisitely packaged food from a portable icebox by a polluted stream and go on to spend the night at a park which is a menace to public health and morals. Just before dozing off on an air mattress, beneath a nylon tent, amid the stench of decaying refuse, they may reflect vaguely on the curious unevenness of their blessings. Is this, indeed, the American genius?” (187)

Now this is a little exaggerated; I’ve gone camping plenty of times without the “stench of decaying refuse”. However, the point is extremely well taken. Our treatment of private goods, which he defines as those purchased individually, versus public goods, which can only be paid for communally, is completely out of whack. We produce a glamorous array of remarkably accessible consumer goods, but our infrastructure is crumbling (or nonexistent, in the case of California’s high-speed rail), and much of our environment polluted. Our schools are a mess, our public health system a disaster, and our murder clearance rate much lower than that of other affluent nations. A vivid illustration of this problem comes from the fifth season of the hyperrealistic crime drama (and all-around excellent show) The Wire, where a Baltimore police officer resorts to fabricating a serial killer in order to get City Hall to release the funds the department needs to solve real murders. By contrast, our military has proven itself to be quite capable, which makes sense given that it eats up an eighth of the entire federal budget.

The dichotomy between our commercial abundance and communal austerity, which Galbraith terms the “social balance”, is a problem, because increased production of private goods necessitates increased production of public goods.

“an increase in the consumption of automobiles requires a facilitating supply of streets, highways, traffic control and parking space. The protective services of the police and the highway patrols must also be available, as must those of the hospitals…The more goods people procure, the more packages they discard and the more trash that must be carried away. If the appropriate sanitation services are not provided, the counterpart of increasing opulence will be deepening filth…As more goods are produced and owned, the greater are the opportunities for fraud and the more property that must be protected. If the provision of law enforcement does not keep pace, the counterpart of increased well-being will, we may be certain, be increased crime.” (189-90)

Galbraith identifies the main cause of our social imbalance as our divergent attitudes toward public and private goods. He makes an interesting case that in large part our preference for the private stems from what he calls the “dependence effect”, whereby consumers are manipulated by industry into desiring all sorts of things they would otherwise have no need for, such as new cleaning products and fast food items. By contrast, there is no comparable investment in marketing for street cleaners, which is why we have clean houses and dirty streets. Given the amount that companies spend on advertising, it must have an impact, but I think he overstates his case a bit with the idea that it’s somehow hypnotizing people, versus just informing them of a new product that will slightly improve their lives.

Conversely, he doesn’t focus enough on what to my mind is the main problem: our instinctive suspicion of public investment. Although government spending actually is included in GDP, we concede far too much to the libertarians by broadly accepting that we should ideally minimize that part of the equation and maximize the other private variables. To an extent, this is an accounting problem: when you buy a bag of chips, you get to eat it immediately. When you pay your taxes, you only see the hole in your wallet, not the (mostly) vital programs you’re contributing to. A large part of Social Security’s enduring success is in explicitly linking the money paid now to the money received later, rather than workers having their payments vanish down a black hole. Americans also like to think of ourselves as independent and not reliant on government handouts.

However, in my view the lion’s share of the blame can be attributed to a concerted effort among those who would bear the brunt of increased public spending to discredit it in every conceivable way. Government spending comes from taxes, and the burden of higher taxes would fall most heavily on the ultrarich, many of whom pay almost nothing now (Jeff Bezos even hilariously claimed a child tax credit in 2011, when he was worth $18 billion). This gives them a pretty strong incentive to bankroll politicians and intellectuals willing to concoct arguments for why taxing the rich is bad actually; because it infringes upon their individual liberty, because the money they keep will “trickle down” to the rest of the economy, because increasing the size of government is dangerous, anything except the one blindingly obvious reason of self-interest. It is no accident that even as Trump has reshaped the Republican party in its own image, his biggest legislative accomplishment in both terms has been substantial tax cuts for the rich and corporations.

And Democrats, for all their talk of the rich “paying their fair share”, as often as not have played along. Galbraith notes that the age-old routine has been for liberals to accept no new taxes on the wealthy in exchange for cuts for the working class. The inevitable result of this has been the inability of receipts to keep up with expenditures, which despite constant pronouncements of the need for economy have risen steadily under administrations of both parties. Again, I have to mention that even the 40th anniversary edition was published in 1998, when the debt was $5.48 trillion. The trend he describes has only accelerated in the years since, with the debt septupling, the complete failure of DOGE to cut spending and now Democrats once more jumping on the anti-tax train with proposals aping the absurd “no tax on tips” which will squeeze revenue immensely at a time when we need it more than ever to pay off the indulgences of the past.

In fairness, there are legitimate reasons to prefer the free market to central planning. There is a reasonable debate to be had about how much of our government inefficiency is due to inherent shortcomings versus lack of investment or even intentional sabotage, as in the case of funding cuts to the IRS that will cost money by allowing more fraud. But there’s no way around the fact that the government is the only vehicle for procuring essential public goods. Again, we can debate what the optimal balance is between public and private investment, but it seems pretty clear that we’re currently far tilted to the private side.

Employment & Security

Perhaps you agree that we need more public goods, but are skeptical that it is so easy as simply redirecting funds from the private sector. After all, granting that advertising has an impact, people are still buying things that they want and need. Higher taxes means fewer of those mutually beneficial transactions. Maybe we are not so affluent as Galbraith supposes, and must wait patiently for growth to naturally bring us the tax revenue required to satisfy our public needs, rather than throwing a wrench into the whole system.

However, Galbraith demonstrates convincingly that what we value about the current system is its security, rather than the actual goods it produces.

“if anyone has surviving doubts as to where the real priorities lie, let him apply a simple test. Let him assume that a President…has the opportunity of defending a large increase in man-hour productivity which has been divided equally between greatly increased total output and greatly increased unemployment. And let it be assumed that as an alternative he might choose unchanged production which has left everyone employed. That full employment is more desirable than increased production combined with unemployment would be clear alike to the most sophisticated and the most primitive politician.” (144)

For proof that the conventional wisdom on employment remains king we need look no further than the current hysteria over AI. As it currently stands,^[2] AI is quite similar to any other technology. It offers the promise of massive productivity gains, which has buoyed the stock market to unprecedented heights in spite of the unprecedented incompetence of the current administration. Yet just 20% of the American public expects it to have a positive impact on the economy. The widespread fear, especially prominent among my age group, is that AI will usher in a “jobs apocalypse,” where robots will do all our work for us. The horror! There’s a classic economics tale that illustrates the absurdity of this view:

“Milton Friedman was once visiting China when he was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, thousands of workers were toiling away building a canal with shovels. He asked his host, a government bureaucrat, why more machines weren’t being used. The bureaucrat replied, ‘You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.’ To which Milton responded, ‘Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, you should give these workers spoons, not shovels!’”

Jobs essentially represent problems that need to be solved. In this light, “job creation” looks like a rather strange goal to have. Few could claim to create more jobs than a serial arsonist, who sparks demand for firefighters, EMTs, police officers, judges, lawyers, prison wardens, perhaps even reporters in proportion to his success. Yet politicians of all stripes regularly tout numbers of jobs created as a concrete metric of their success, including in industries such as coal mining that ideally people should not have to work in.

Of course, these jobs do have value, in that they provide a person’s livelihood. But this is a hideously inefficient mechanism of support, and not even particularly reliable. Consider the case of the arsonist once more. Say that one of his marginal impacts is that the local hospital hires an extra burn specialist, who is much relieved to have found a position in this tight job market, and would otherwise have been unemployed. Somehow, the hospital finds room in its budget for her salary (this convoluted process likely creating a great deal of valuable work on its own), likely aided by the grateful contributions of the burn victims. Surely it would be better for her to obtain this position without the arsonist’s help, or, better still, for everyone involved to just pay her without her needing to relocate and commute to the hospital every day. The arsonist didn’t create the money, just the work. So why not have the money without the work?

And yet the idea that someone could get paid without actually doing work is a heresy of the greatest order. This is the central point of The Affluent Society. In the hardscrabble past, it was a reasonable attitude to have that people should work to get paid. Now, there is more than enough to go around, at least in our country. It is simply no longer necessary to demand that everyone pitch in for their fair share of production when we produce far more than we need. The question then becomes, what we should do instead.

The Divorce

Galbraith’s remedy is remarkably straightforward. The first step is to simply decouple production from security in our collective consciousness, to harness our affluence to provide a basic standard of living for all, no strings attached. This is easier said than done. The objection that immediately flies to mind is that humans need motivation. If we open up welfare for everyone, why would anyone work??! This leads to one of two scenarios: either no one works, in which case production of even the most necessary goods collapses, a catastrophe, or the hardworking minority is forced to support the idle masses, untenable in the long run.

This argument is wrong on several levels. First, for many people (and a much higher proportion among the most important fields) the income from their job is secondary. Scientists aren’t going to stop trying to cure diseases because they could scroll TikTok and harvest welfare instead. Ditto for doctors, professors, politicians, police officers, firefighters and creative workers. And even if money is of paramount importance, you’ll probably want to spend your time making as much of it as you can as an investment banker or corporate lawyer, which, given a well-designed incentive structure, can still be quite rewarding if less so than currently. For jobs that no one wants to do, like waste disposal, the salaries will simply have to be adjusted higher, probably putting them more in line with their true value, until the robots arrive and can do it all for us.

Second, the idea that we must maintain maximal employment is already a fantasy. The employment-population ratio currently stands at 59.1, meaning that nearly half the country does not work. These lazy bums include children, the elderly, the disabled and the sick, as well as stay-at-home mothers, college students and, to be sure, some number of genuine idlers. The threat this small group poses to society with the withholding of their likely not-very-valuable labor is wildly exaggerated, compared with the Scylla and Charybdis of inflation and depression always looming over the economy.

Finally, if we truly needed to increase production we would have plenty of alternatives to full employment. Galbraith outlines four possible methods other than discouraging idleness. To counteract this, we could increase the labor supply, via immigration and possibly encouraging higher birth rates, increase the capital supply by a more concerted effort to save and invest, increase the efficiency of the current allocation of labor and capital in the economy, and invest more intentionally in technological innovation. He makes the interesting point that because basic research is rarely profitable for corporations, many critical technological breakthroughs have come from the military, such as the internet, microwaves, nuclear energy and (critically for me) EpiPens. If we had a well-funded and organized government research agency working full time with the urgency of the army in wartime, who knows what kind of discoveries we could’ve had by now?

With that objection laid to rest, we can turn to the problem of how best to redistribute the fruits of the private economy. The solution is a thing of beauty, beneficial in as many ways as the motivation argument is flawed. The negative income tax (NIT) works by setting a threshold of income below which rather than pay the government, the government pays you. The payments steadily decrease as income increases, and once you’re above the threshold it functions as a regular progressive income tax. Which…hardly seems that revolutionary at first. It’s actually quite similar to what we already have, a progressive income tax combined with various welfare programs and tax credits designed to help the poor. So what’s the big deal?

The problem with the current system is that it fails to provide security. Unemployment benefits are supposed to be temporary and many programs have work requirements. By contrast, the NIT could have the base payments set high enough to provide one’s basic needs. Then unemployment is not such a disaster, because there’s no danger that you’ll end up homeless. And if unemployment spikes due to large productivity gains, for example due to AI, then the extra revenue from the top can easily be converted into higher base payments, neatly spreading the benefit.

And as it turns out, the NIT has many other features to recommend it. So many, in fact, that in the height of irony it was popularized by none other than the arch-libertarian Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom, four years after the publication of The Affluent Society.^[3] He makes the case with abundant clarity:

“The advantages of this arrangement are clear. It is directed specifically at the problem of poverty. It gives help in the form most useful to the individual, namely, cash. It is general and could be substituted for the host of special measures now in effect. It makes explicit the cost borne by society. It operates outside the market. Like any other measures to alleviate poverty, it reduces the incentives of those helped to help themselves, but it does not eliminate that incentive entirely, as a system of supplementing incomes up to some fixed minimum would. An extra dollar earned always means more money available for expenditure.”

From the start, the purpose of the NIT is clear: to redistribute money from the wealthy to the impoverished. Why should we do this? The biggest reason is diminishing marginal utility of money. The less cash you have, the more valuable each dollar is. One of Elon Musk’s stray billions could easily feed every single homeless person in America for a month, or permanently house several thousand in cheaper real estate markets. Another reason is to prevent resentment and disorder by giving everyone a stake in a well-functioning society. Finally, as I discussed, it provides security in a way that the current safety net does not.

By contrast, the current welfare-taxation regime is a patchwork of illogical handouts to politically-favored constituencies, designed to prevent the terrible sin of sending a single hard-earned taxpayer dollar to an undeserving bum. The main reason Friedman supports the NIT is that it could replace this tangled bureaucratic nightmare with a single, streamlined system. This would greatly increase administrative efficiency and decrease intrusive surveillance to guarantee compliance with onerous work requirements.

It would also fix the incentive structure. A well-known problem with current welfare programs is that with a hard income ceiling, many are trapped just below that ceiling, unable to get a raise without giving up their crucial support. Under a NIT, as Galbraith says, “to work is always to have more income” (222). True, the safety net does still reduce the incentive to work harder, but this is truly a very minor cost, and the NIT does so in the least harmful way.

Finally, Galbraith emphasizes yet another benefit of relying primarily on an income tax: it naturally adjusts to the macroeconomy. In depressions, tax receipts drop, which alleviates the burden on taxpayers and forces the government to rely on debt to finance its operations, stimulating the economy. In good times, coffers swell, tempering inflation and allowing the government to pay off its accumulated debts. The NIT truly is a marvel.

However, it alone is not enough. I should caveat these next two paragraphs by noting that I haven’t run the numbers, so all this is just educated guesswork, but even though the NIT could raise a lot of money just by raising the rates on the rich, that extra revenue has to be balanced against more generous welfare payments, Galbraith’s proposed public investments, and the debt, which seems like a stretch. He does mention other ways of bringing in cash, such as closing various tax loopholes and reducing military expenses, to which I would add IRS funding, but is realistic that the savings that could come from these measures is still likely insufficient.

That being said, we need not confine our focus to the federal level. Many crucial services are maintained at the state and local level, and without the burden of the safety net and the national debt, extra revenue there could go much more directly to addressing the social balance. With income tax already accounted for, Galbraith identifies the sales tax as the next best measure. It is similarly adaptive to the macroeconomy (in contrast to rigid property taxes), but here the burden falls more heavily on those who spend a greater proportion of their income, namely, the poor. However, I think this is not nearly as big of a problem as it sounds. Galbraith amusingly notes that the variety of goods captured in GDP includes “narcotics, comic books and pornographia” (190-1). Much of the present discussion of inflation centers on food and energy. Why not exempt these critical categories entirely and instead focus all our tax collection efforts on luxuries, doubly so on those justifiable on Pigouvian grounds? This would reorient the tax burden back on the rich, who spend far more on luxuries than essentials, and would open up a separate revenue stream for state and city governments.

As I mentioned, this is only the broadest of outlines, but it seems quite promising to me. Even if all this budget finagling could “only” address the safety net and the debt, that would still be a major accomplishment, and we would be well set up to spread the wealth generated by future productivity gains, getting rid of this very strange status quo where everyone is terrified of higher production. By contrast, each day that we sit on our hands makes this status quo ever more untenable. The enemy of the conventional wisdom is events, and like it or not, the future is coming.

The Urgency of the Future

Given the possible nature of these events, however, this should be cold comfort. We are entering an era of problems that must be foreseen to be mitigated. Engineered pandemics, supervolcanoes, malevolent superintelligent AI and many more “x-risks” will not wait for the conventional wisdom to come around.

What does this have to do with tax policy? In The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, Toby Ord mentions several times that humanity currently spends more on ice cream than x-risk mitigation. There is no clearer illustration of the problem of social balance. To prepare for the future, we need to know what’s coming. To know what’s coming, we need to invest in research. To invest in research, we need to stop investing so much in narcotics, comic books, pornographia and ice cream. That right now is a major bottleneck.

And if most x-risks are still somewhat theoretical, mundane AI certainly is not. Many tech CEOs are rediscovering UBI (quite similar to the NIT) as a way to address the massive productivity gains anticipated by the stock market, and trying to sell us on a “post-work future.” Unfortunately, they’re running headlong into the conventional wisdom on employment, which has overstayed its welcome in our collective consciousness for the better part of a century. Galbraith’s divorce is the only option.

I also want to give Galbraith credit for another incredibly prescient point with his discussion of education, which he strongly encourages investment in. It is not just material but personal capital as well that demands attention, especially if we’re focused on scientific research. The benefits of an educated populace are also quite apparent with our current kakistocratic administration, exemplified by our health secretary, who instead of leading much of this vital research is gutting it due to an irrational aversion to vaccines, when he isn’t swimming in bacteria-infested ponds and harvesting raccoon genitalia.

It is quite remarkable that the solutions to so many complicated modern-day problems could boil down to a relatively straightforward if monumental restructuring of the tax code. Possibly I am overoptimistic about the potential of Galbraith’s proposals. The natural test case is Europe, where many countries have very progressive income taxes along with substantial VATs (a modified sales tax). And the EU is often compared unfavorably with the US in terms of economic development.

I am far from an expert here, or on any of this really, but I do want to offer some possible defenses of Europe. I lived in Amsterdam for several months last year, and the reliable public transit and clean streets are quality-of-life improvements that don’t show up in per-capita GDP. During that time, I traveled to Istanbul and had the misfortune of needing to check into a hospital. The cost of my staying in a bed for several hours was roughly $14, less than I paid for two beers the night before. Higher income is meaningless if essential expenses drain it all. Also, it is quite possible that Europe has imposed excessive regulation in many areas, as is the case here with housing in blue cities, which is a separate issue from taxation. That being said, I do want to practice epistemic humility and temper my tone a little bit; it is unlikely that simply adopting a NIT will suddenly solve poverty and x-risks.

However, on the whole I think The Affluent Society is a remarkably promising blueprint for dealing with the problems of the 21st century. While I have brushed over some minor areas of disagreement (and one infuriating moment, where he erroneously dismisses utilitarianism as “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” (214)), I found myself agreeing with Galbraith at almost every turn, and his argument united a lot of instincts I had but hadn’t pieced together. And certainly Milton Friedman endorsing your wealth redistribution scheme is a good sign.

So in conclusion, if you’ve made it this far in the review I highly recommend checking out the book on your own. If you want to free yourself from the clutches of the conventional wisdom, don’t just take my word for it. And carry a lighter for the next time someone complains about AI taking jobs.