I Can't Get No

While Galbraith's book was "entertaining," I found several of his arguments to be inappropriate caricaturizations of the actual situations he describes.

In particular, Galbraith's critique of consumer demand theory was especially unconvincing. Discussing the principles of consumer demand, Galbraith declares, "Production only fills a void that it has itself created" (125). This attitude, first elaborated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is simply inconsistent with many basic tenets of economic theory. For one thing, goods are desirable and good, by definition; Galbraith asserts that there is nothing inherently advantageous about a society being able to produce or acquire an absolutely larger number of goods than at another point in time or compared to another society. For Galbraith, because the introduction of new goods necessarily increases the envy and desire for those goods, a society can never come closer to reconciling its desires and its ability to achieve those desires. However, this ignores the possibility that a society can ever increase the productivity of the basic goods, such as food, shelter, and clothing; these desires are at some level are essentially the same, regardless of Galbraith's assessment of the artificiality of a desire for a specific type of food or clothing.

For another thing, Galbraith/Rousseau's view also assumes that "demons" are the cause of desires; according to this attitude, envy and irrational passions are the reasons people seem to desire more goods as time progresses, not the ever-increasingly wider availability of several goods that individuals would rather have than not. It seems to me that there are some goods, which can be objectively desirable without having envy play the only role in its demand. A primitive or hermetic man, living outside social interaction, would probably have some demand for a hammer or aspirin without having seen any advertisements for either. Additionally, people are capable of acting on the behalf of their own true desires (such as a desire for knowledge or things of a purely aesthetic quality), rather than externally motivated desires. In a sense, Galbraith denies existentialism; he finds it untenable for people to legitimately satisfy exclusively artificially created desires: "the case cannot stand if it is the process of satisfying wants that creates the wants." According to Galbraith, people in general are incapable of satisfying their desires fully; however, this focus is on the macro scale, rather than on an individual level.

Galbraith all but proves that our artificially stimulated desires are the direct cause of the phenomenon of ever-increasing quality of life found in modern economic states, yet concludes that because production creates its own wants, no intrinsic change in satisfaction could have possibly occurred (Galbraith ignores the possibility that increasing quality of life could accrue benefits greater than the associatedcosts of increased desire). However, this claim comes with no actual argumentation or analysis; rather, Galbraith rhetorically asserts that his assumptions "would be regarded as elementary by the most retarded student in the nation's most primitive school of business administration." Of course, this comes after he had previously noted, "if the individual's own real income is rising, the fact that unknown New Yorkers, Texans or West Coast computer entrepreneurs are exceedingly wealthy is not, probably, a matter of prime urgency" (71). Current trends in the boom-bust business cycle, the solvency of free markets, and the ideas of increasing real income and purchasing power parity seem to undermine Galbraith's argument; it seems that happiness can be achieved through production, and the enjoyment of goods equal to the value of one's production. More on this in class...