The New Industrial State

Front Cover
Princeton University Press, Apr 29, 2007 - Business & Economics - 518 pages

With searing wit and incisive commentary, John Kenneth Galbraith redefined America's perception of itself in The New Industrial State, one of his landmark works. The United States is no longer a free-enterprise society, Galbraith argues, but a structured state controlled by the largest companies. Advertising is the means by which these companies manage demand and create consumer "need" where none previously existed. Multinational corporations are the continuation of this power system on an international level. The goal of these companies is not the betterment of society, but immortality through an uninterrupted stream of earnings.


First published in 1967, The New Industrial State continues to resonate today.

 

Selected pages

Contents

General Editors Introduction
ix
Foreword
xi
Acknowledgments
xxv
Introduction to the Fourth Edition
xxvii
Change and the Planning System
1
The Imperatives of Technology
13
The Nature of Industrial Planning
25
Planning and the Supply of Capital
42
The Management of Specific Demand
245
The Revised Sequence
263
The Regulation of Aggregate Demand
273
The Nature of Employment and Unemployment
289
The Control of the WagePrice Spiral
305
The Planning System and the Union I
322
The Planning System and the Union II
337
The Educational and Scientific Estate
347

Capital and Power
56
The Technostructure
73
The Corporation
89
The Entrepreneur and the Technostructure
108
A Digression on the Firm under Socialism
123
The Approved Contradiction
138
The General Theory of Motivation
162
Motivation in Perspective
176
Motivation and the Technostructure
186
The Principle of Consistency
199
The Goals of the Planning System
207
Prices in the Planning System
223
Prices in the Planning System Continued
235
The Planning System and the State I
365
The Planning System and the State II
377
A Further Summary
390
The Planning System and the Arms Race
398
The Further Dimensions
419
The Planning Lacunae
432
Of Toil
443
Education and Emancipation
452
The Political Lead
462
The Future of the Planning System
473
An Addendum on Economic Method and the Nature of Social Argument
489
Index
503
Copyright

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About the author (2007)

John Kenneth Galbraith is a Canadian-born American economist who is perhaps the most widely read economist in the world. He taught at Harvard from 1934-1939 and then again from 1949-1975. An adviser to President John F. Kennedy, he served from 1961 to 1963 as U.S. ambassador to India. His style and wit in writing and his frequent media appearances have contributed greatly to his fame as an economist. Galbraith believes that it is not sufficient for government to manage the level of effective demand; government must manage the market itself. Galbraith stated in American Capitalism (1952) that the market is far from competitive, and governments and labor unions must serve as "countervailing power." He believes that ultimately "producer sovereignty" takes the place of consumer sovereignty and the producer - not the consumer - becomes ruler of the marketplace.