The Affluent Society

by John Kenneth Galbraith

Serious depressions are not accidental misfortunes. They are inherent in the conflict between industry and business and hence are organic aspects of the system. They occur “in the regular course of business.”7 Finally, in his immortal The Theory of the Leisure Class,8 Veblen dramatized, as no one before or since, the spectacle of inequality. The rich and successful were divorced from any serious economic function and denied the dignity of even a serious or indignant attack. They became, instead, a subject for detached, bemused and even contemptuous observation. One watches the struggle between hens for social pre-eminence in the chicken yard as an interesting phenomenon but, in so doing, one does not do much to underwrite the social values of the birds. So with Veblen on the rich. But equally with Ricardo, wealth and poverty were made inherent. And so, moreover, were their least ingratiating aspects. The ostentation, waste, idleness and immorality of the rich were all purposeful: they were the advertisements of success in the pecuniary culture. Work, by contrast, was merely a caste mark of inferiority.