Why Didn't Galbraith Convince Us That America Is an Affluent Society?

John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1958) was immensely popular-a book by an economist that reached number 2 on the New York Times Nonfiction Best Seller List, stayed on the list for six months, became a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, sold more than one million copies, and was translated into more than two dozen languages (Parker 2005, 292, 720). Four decades after it was published, the Modern Library placed it at forty-sixth on its list of the top-one-hundred English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century ("100 Best Nonfiction" n.d.), and the Guardian rated it as the century's twenty-fourth best nonfiction work (McCrum 2016). More than one leading high school American history textbook has a chapter on the 1950s titled "The Affluent Society."The book was widely reviewed, widely discussed, and even widely read. The Affluent Society is certainly a good read. Economists lauded Galbraith's prose as "bold, readable, quotable," "a model of how economics should be written," with "bristling insights." It was "a penetrating tract," full of "clever and vivid prose," "urbane and engaging," "brilliant and often moving" (quotations respectively from Parsons 1959; Clairmonte 1959; Sosnick 1960; Thomson 1959; Boulding 1959). The reviews, however, were sometimes critical and often quite mixed, praising the volume as a "tremendous achievement" in one breath but complaining in the next that its "argument is not close-knit" (Parson 1959).