JK Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958)1
It is hard to write about a subject that is as typically dry and tedious as economics in a way that is consistently engaging. One writer who managed to do that, as indicative of the opening quote, was Harvard economist, diplomat, and presidential advisor, John Kenneth Galbraith. Among his many books, one that is perhaps considered his best was the 1958 bestseller, The Affluent Society. In his opening pages, Galbraith set out to challenge what he famously referred to as the ‘conventional wisdom’ [in economics], and in doing so, was pointing out the poor state of the metaphorical door that he had the misadventure of leaning against.
One of Galbraith’s challenges was to characterise the modern economy as a ‘giant squirrel wheel’. He wrote:
“Consumer wants can have bizarre, frivolous or even immoral origins, and an admirable case can still be made for a society that seeks to satisfy them. But the case cannot stand if it is the process of satisfying the wants that creates the wants. For then the individual who urges the importance of production to satisfy these wants is precisely in the position of the onlooker who applauds the efforts of the squirrel to keep abreast of the
