The Affluent Society is a 1958 book by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. The book sought to clearly outline the manner in which the post-World War II United States was becoming wealthy in the private sector but remained poor in the public sector, lacking social and physical infrastructure, and perpetuating income disparities. The book sparked much public discussion at the time, and it is widely remembered for Galbraith's popularizing of the term "conventional wisdom".
Many of the same ideas were later expanded and refined in Galbraith's 1967 book, The New Industrial State.
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich called it his favorite on the subject of economics. The Modern Library placed the book at #46 on its top 100 non-fiction books of the 20th century.
Famous quotes containing the words affluent society, affluent and/or society:
“Our affluent society contains those of talent and insight who are driven to prefer poverty, to choose it, rather than to submit to the desolation of an empty abundance. It is a strange part of the other America that one finds in the intellectual slums.”
—Michael Harrington (1928–1989)
“Many older wealthy families have learned to instill a sense of public service in their offspring. But newly affluent middle-class parents have not acquired this skill. We are using our children as symbols of leisure-class standing without building in safeguards against an overweening sense of entitlement—a sense of entitlement that may incline some young people more toward the good life than toward the hard work that, for most of us, makes the good life possible.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Someone who does not write books, who thinks a lot, and who lives in unsatisfying society will usually be a good letter- writer.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)