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    The Good Society: The Human Agenda
    The Good Society: The Human Agenda
    The Good Society: The Human Agenda
    Ebook138 pages2 hours

    The Good Society: The Human Agenda

    By John Kenneth Galbraith

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    The legendary economist explains how a nation can remain both compassionate and fiscally sound, with “common sense raised to the level of genius” (The New Yorker).
     
    This compact, eloquent book offers a blueprint for a workable national agenda that allows for human weakness without compromising a humane culture. Arguing that it is in the best interest of the United States to avoid excessive wealth and income inequality, and to safeguard the well-being of its citizens, he explores how the goal of a good society can be achieved in an economically feasible way.
     
    Touching on topics from regulation, inflation, and deficits to education, the environment, bureaucracy, and the military, Galbraith avoids purely partisan or rigid ideological politics—instead addressing practical problems with logic and well-thought-out principles.
     
    “Carefully reasoned . . . the pragmatically liberal Galbraith [argues] that both socialism and complete surrender to market forces are irrelevant as guides to public action.” —Publishers Weekly
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateApr 30, 1997
    ISBN9780547349572
    The Good Society: The Human Agenda
    Author

    John Kenneth Galbraith

    John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) was a critically acclaimed author and one of America's foremost economists. His most famous works include The Affluent Society, The Good Society, and The Great Crash. Galbraith was the recipient of the Order of Canada and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, and he was twice awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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      Book preview

      The Good Society - John Kenneth Galbraith

      Copyright © 1996 by John Kenneth Galbraith

      All rights reserved

      For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

      www.hmhco.com

      The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

      Galbraith, John Kenneth, date.

      The good society : the humane dimension / John

      Kenneth Galbraith.

      p. cm

      Includes index.

      ISBN 13: 978-0-395-85998-8

      ISBN 10: 0-395-85998-0

      1. Welfare economics. 2. Income distribution. 3. Social justice. 4. Consumption (Economics) 5. Individualism.

      I. Title

      HB846.G35 1996 96-983

      330.12'6—dc20 CIP

      eISBN 978-0-547-34957-2

      v3.0318

      Acknowledgments

      My first word of thanks goes to the Deutsche Evangelische Kirche (the biyearly meeting of the German Evangelical Church), which in the early summer of 1993 gathered the many thousands in Munich and asked me to speak on the good society. This started a current of thought and effort that I then pursued, as other obligations allowed, for the next two years, strengthened, as I later tell, by recent political developments and deviance in the United States and elsewhere.

      The Good Society has been used as a title on various works before, and with no slight popular effect on a treatise by Walter Lippmann in 1937. There was no search for imitative distinction here. The Good Society merely expresses with the greatest clarity my intention in this exercise.

      As ever, I thank my Harvard colleagues with whom I have discussed these matters and my son James Galbraith, professor at the University of Texas, who has given me access to his excellent computer bank. Andrea Williams, my friend and collaborator for thirty-seven years, has, as before, brought to bear her editorial skills, her good humor and a certain patient persistence developed over the decades so that my English prose does not arouse the concern or the compassion of my critics. To Andrea, truly my thanks. Brooke Palmer, my very effective administrative assistant, has with tact and skill fended off or absorbed competing claims on my time, making it possible for me to write and, I trust, to think. I have a special word for my publisher, Houghton Mifflin Company, with whom I have also had a friendly association for almost half a century. Rarely have author and publisher combined so agreeably for so long.

      Finally, and certainly not least, Catherine Atwater Galbraith has, as so often, been my beloved and wholly tolerant supporter in the writing of this book. It was fitting that my original inspiration should have occurred in Munich, for it was there as a graduate student that she had a significant part of her own scholarly career. Ever since a sparkling day in the autumn of 1937, she has watched over all my efforts with patience, encouragement and loving tolerance. To Kitty especially, my thanks and my love.

      JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH

      Cambridge, Massachusetts

      November 1995

      For Sissela and Derek Bok

      1

      The Good Society

      AMONG THE GREAT NATIONS of the world none is more given to introspection than the United States. No day passes without reflective comment—by the press, on radio or television, in an article or book, in compelled and sometimes compelling oratory—on what is wrong in the society and what could be improved. This is also, if in lesser measure, a preoccupation in the other industrial lands—Britain, Canada, France, Germany, elsewhere in Europe and in Japan. No one can deplore this exercise; far better and far more informative such a search than the facile assumption that all is well. Before knowing what is right, one must know what is wrong.

      There is, however, another, less traveled course of thought. That is to explore and define what, very specifically, would be right. Just what should the good society be? Toward what, stated as clearly as may be possible, should we aim? The tragic gap between the fortunate and the needful having been recognized, how, in a practical way, can it be closed? How can economic policy contribute to this end? What of the public services of the state; how can they be made more equitably and efficiently available? How can the environment, present and future, be protected? What of immigration, migration and migrants? What of the military power? What is the responsibility and course of action of the good society as regards its trading partners and neighbors in an increasingly internationalized world and as regards the poor of the planet? The responsibility for economic and social well-being is general, transnational. Human beings are human beings wherever they live. Concern for their suffering from hunger, other deprivation and disease does not end because those so afflicted are on the other side of an international frontier. This is the case even though no elementary truth is so consistently ignored or, on occasion, so fervently assailed.

      To tell what would be right is the purpose of this book. It is clear at the outset that it will encounter a difficult problem, for a distinction must be made, a line drawn, between what might be perfect and what is achievable. This task and the result may not be politically popular and certainly not in a polity where, as I shall argue, the fortunate are now socially and politically dominant. To identify and urge the good and achievable society may well be a minority effort, but better that effort than none at all. Perhaps, at a minimum, the comfortable will be afflicted in a useful way. In any case, there is no chance for the better society unless the good and achievable society is clearly defined.

      It is the achievable, not the perfect, that is here identified and described. To envision a perfect society has not in the past been an unattractive exercise,- over the centuries it has been attempted by many scholars and not a few of the greatest philosophers. It is also, alas, a formula for dismissal. The predictable reaction is the statement that one’s goals are purely Utopian. The real world has constraints imposed by human nature, by history and by deeply in- - grained patterns of thought. There are also constitutional restraints and other long-established legislative procedures as well as the controls attendant on the political party system. And there is the fixed institutional structure of the economy—the corporations and the other business enterprises, large and small, and the limits they impose. In all the industrial countries, there is the firm commitment to the consumer economy—to consumer goods and services—as the primary source of human satisfaction and enjoyment and as the most visible measure of social achievement. There is also the even more urgent need for the income that comes from production. In the modern economy, a slightly bizarre fact, production is now more necessary for the employment it provides than for the goods and services it supplies.

      Any useful identification of the good society must therefore take into consideration the institutional structure and the human characteristics that are fixed, immutable. They make the difference between the Utopian and the achievable, between the agreeably irrelevant and the ultimately possible.

      To define the achievable is the most difficult problem with which an essay such as this contends. It is also the most controversial. To call some urgently required action politically or socially impossible is the first (and sometimes the only) line of defense against unwanted change.

      This book tells of the good society that is the achievable society. It accepts that some barriers to achievement are immobile, decisive, and thus must be accepted. But there are also goals that cannot be compromised. In the good society all of its citizens must have personal liberty, basic well-being, racial and ethnic equality, the opportunity for a rewarding life. Nothing, it must be recognized, so comprehensively denies the liberties of the individual as a total absence of money. Or so impairs it as too little. In the years of Communism it is not clear that one would wisely have exchanged the restraints on freedom of the resident of East Berlin for those imposed by poverty on the poorest citizens of the South Bronx in New York. Meanwhile, nothing so inspires socially useful effort as the prospect of pecuniary reward, both for what it procures and not rarely for the pleasure of pure possession it accords. This too the good society must acknowledge; these motivations are controlling.

      As there are shaping forces, some deep in human nature, that must be accepted, so there are constraints that the good society cannot, must not, accept. Socially desirable change is regularly denied out of well-recognized self-interest. In the most important current case, the comfortably affluent resist public action for the poor because of the threat of increased taxes or the failure of a promise of tax reduction. This, the good society cannot accept. The seemingly decisive constraint here, in fact, is a political attitude that supports and sustains the very conditions that require correction. When it is said that some action may be good but is politically impractical, it must be understood that this is the common design for protecting a socially adverse interest.

      It is the nature of privileged position that it develops its own political justification and often the economic and social doctrine that serves it best. No one likes to believe that his or her personal well-being is in conflict with the greater public need. To invent a plausible or, if necessary, a moderately implausible ideology in defense of self-interest is thus a natural course. A corps of willing and talented craftsmen is available for the task. And such ideology gains greatly in force as those who are favored increase in number. The pages that follow contend with but do not respect this broad tendency. Their purpose is to challenge it wherever, as is often

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