The Affluent Society

by John Kenneth Galbraith

To proclaim the need for new ideas has served, in some measure, as a substitute for them.

Thus any individual, on being elected president of a college or university, automatically wins the right to enunciate the conventional wisdom. It is one of the rewards of high academic rank, although such rank itself is a reward for expounding the conventional wisdom at a properly sophisticated level.

Production only fills a void that it has itself created.