To answer the Galbraith Question, we must reverse the imbalance he described, requiring that we:
Rebuild public goods, requiring investment in housing, health, education, infrastructure, and culture as the true basis of prosperity.
Tax private excess. Wealth, inheritance, and speculative gains must be taxed to fund collective provision.
Challenge advertising. We must regulate the industries that profit from manufacturing insecurity and demand.
Redefine prosperity. We must measure success not by consumption of status goods but by the quality of public life.
Kneecap ticket sales are down so we’re going to confiscate Granny’s house to pay them.
Comrade.
Sheesh… Kim Sol Anum hath spoken!!
Sounds nice, until you ask the question: “Who gets to Decide?”….
‘Redefine prosperity’
And after that, what?
You will own nothing
You will live in the cube
You will eat the soylent
You will be happy
Some people own as many as three pairs of shoes. This cannot be allowed.
A bowl of pease pudding and drag queen storytime is all you need, comrades.
He is rather a Klueless Kommunist Kommissar, inn’e?
We must measure success not by consumption of status goods but by the quality of public life.
Complete end to third-world immigration followed by mass deportations it is then!
Turns out Ritchie was ‘our guy’ all along…
The world that lives inside his head must be a fucking grim place.
I’m told by those that have visited North Korea that once you get to know your guides and travelling companions it can be a fascincating place. Murphy’s vision sounds like a place where anything overly joyous is strictly forbidden.
There are huge black markets in NK that are like an open secret. Everyone knows they are going on.
The whole world is full of “official versions” that also largely get parroted by activists, historians and media, and then there’s the truth. If you read the media, you might think Sweden has successfully banned prostitution. People in the government can say how successful it’s been by certain criteria (like reduction in street walkers). But it’s still going on. The escort agencies moved to Norway or Denmark. And really, the government does this sort of thing to keep a few feminists happy but don’t actually care that much. So you do the odd raid once a year with a camera crew along to make it look like it’s working, but so feminists fuck off.
“Rebuild public goods, requiring investment in housing, health, education, infrastructure, and culture as the true basis of prosperity.”
What infrastructure? Other than high speed choo choos for wankers (and we’ll probably regret not going maglev in a decade, high speed rail barely improving speed where maglev is a big leap).
And how much investment in “culture” has worked? Forget even the thing of making dosh, how many BFI movies gave gone on to be considered great works of art? In the last 5 years, out of dozens of movies there’s Aftersun. The problem is that so much of it is being tapped into the right people to get approval. And ticking the right boxes. Talented filmmakers don’t really get involved. The BFI is never going to fund a film like The Raid, which is an amazing movie for under a million dollars. There are no good operas with hummable tunes about tragic women since WW2. After about the 1970s, theatre mostly became about THATCHER, racism, the bomb, or old plays.
Don’t forget the naggers. I hate theatre but was persuaded to accompany an NHS consultant pal who’d been given free tickets – by the NHS. The play – written by, for, and performed by naggers – was absolutely everything you might expect, including the usual hubristic and deluded wimmin’s assumption that they completely understand boys and men.
That’s it. No more theatre for me until death, under any circumstances. TV drama can fuck off, too.
If the free market was good enough for Shakespeare….
On the subject of choo choos they work here because of all those vertical villages which clustered together have the population of a large town in the area of one of our large villages. Of course trains work in these circumstances, but this is what those wankers imagine.
https://x.com/cityaestheticss/status/1972292712276586621?s=61&t=VX5cJ0-osgn_JSz7j-uowQ
The problem with trains is how many idiots don’t get the density thing. It’s about how long you have to wait, how long connections take. Trains work great in London because so many people want to use them. So you can have a circle line train every 5 minutes. In low density places either you have a train every 30 minutes, or you need massive subsidies to take them down to 5.
It’s why the most sensible thing is taking government out of transport. If you shut down about 75% of the rail network it would make zero difference in terms of congestion, pollution. It would probably be greener. You could put the people on the Chippenham to Westbury train in a minibus. It would be more efficient if people in rural areas shared taxis than putting on barely used buses for them.
Best theatre I’ve been to in the last three decades was Prisoner Cell Block H: The Musical and Men At Arms. Neither of which had public subsidy.
John Kenneth (Ken) Galbraith, the Canadian-American economist, was one of the most eloquent critics of modern capitalism.
Writing in The Affluent Society (1958), he observed something that remains as true today as it was then: advanced economies were awash with private consumption – cars, gadgets, advertising, status goods – while public services, schools, transport, and communities were starved of investment.
He called this imbalance the central contradiction of affluence: societies rich enough to provide comfort for all chose instead to tolerate inequality and neglect.
I’ve no doubt Murphy considers himself at the vanguard of the ‘New Class’ which Galbraith highlighted. But how can anyone say the NHS, which I think consumes 15% of expenditure to kill thousands is ‘starved of resources’?? state education? The Diversity industry? LGBT Alphabet Soup provision?
Galbraith skewered the idea that markets automatically meet needs. They meet wants that can pay. And, worse still, they manufacture wants through advertising, turning insecurity into desire. Meanwhile, genuine social needs — health, education, clean air, public spaces — languish because they are not profitable.
This paradox leads directly to what might be called the Galbraith Question: if affluence produces private luxury alongside public squalor, what does that say about the values and survival of our society?
The problem with this is that the alternative, both at the time Galbraith was writing and subsequently in the 1970s and 80s and ever since has produced public squalor, both material and spiritual that could not have been envisaged in the worst of dystopias. Citizens of North Korea will swim a wide polluted waterway knowing that if they are caught both they and their families will suffer tortures unimaginable, and yet they still choose to do that. For every halfwit Guardian moron saying that ‘isn’t real socialism’ it is – that’s the reality.
The tyranny of private consumption
Galbraith pointed out that in post-war America, consumer goods multiplied while public schools were overcrowded, roads crumbled, and parks decayed. This was no accident. Markets prioritise what individuals with purchasing power demand, not what societies collectively need. The result was a distorted pattern of growth: glitzy suburbs and shiny appliances alongside underfunded services.
Today, the imbalance is worse. Billionaires build private rockets while hospitals cannot afford basic equipment. Luxury flats sit empty while homelessness rises. Markets pump out smartphones while public broadband lags. Galbraith’s warning has become prophecy.
Visit Venezuela, Myriad African countries or North Korea to see where the alternative is at. It might open your eyes but then again probably not. It’d no doubt be the fault of Israel or something else…
The manufactured wants of advertising
Galbraith also identified the “dependence effect”: the idea that in modern capitalism, demand is not spontaneous but manufactured. Advertising does not simply inform; it persuades, manipulates, and creates dissatisfaction. We are told endlessly that our lives are incomplete without the latest product.
This endless stimulation of private wants diverts resources into trivia, while real needs, such as poverty reduction, social housing, and climate resilience, are neglected. The system thrives on making us feel perpetually inadequate. Squalor is not an accident; it is the shadow cast by a system that profits from dissatisfaction.
I think the brilliant Grikath, as he so often does, boils it down to the essentials. The above is all fine and dandy but who gets to decide what is ‘adequate resources’ and more importantly ‘quis custodiet custodes?’ – I could probably off the top of my head give you fifteen African countries at minimum (Angola, Algeria, Gabon, Burundi etc) where collective provision has caused squalor on a level we would frankly find difficult to imagine. While the people presiding over it have a lot more to show for it than a rented end of terrace house in the Fens.
The neglect of public goods
Markets undervalue what cannot be bought and sold. Clean streets, safe communities, universal healthcare, cultural life — these do not appear on corporate balance sheets. They require public investment. But under the sway of market dogma, governments have been told to cut, privatise, and outsource.
The result is precisely what Galbraith warned of: gleaming shopping malls surrounded by potholes; private gyms for the rich while public parks decay; high-end medicine for those who pay while basic care is rationed for everyone else. Public squalor becomes the backdrop to private plenty.
I wonder if he was absolutely stoned throughout the 1970s? Can he not recall the piles of rubbish, the endless strikes, the grime, the dirty and polluted beaches. Also private actors and governments make endless interventions on behalf of things that can’t be measured. How the Actual F$%^ does he think his much heralded diversity came about? Given the effect of diversity is probably to take 20% of GDP it’s certainly not represented on any balance sheet I’ve ever seen.
The political economy of neglect
Why does this persist? Because those with wealth have no need for public provision. They buy private healthcare, private schooling, and private security. For them, public services are not vital but irrelevant — even threatening, since they require taxation.
Meanwhile, the majority are told that taxes are theft and public spending is a waste. Political elites, funded by the wealthy, reinforce the message. The outcome is a politics that systematically undervalues collective goods while lavishing subsidies on private capital.
Taxation levels are too high, and private saving has collapsed for all but the very wealthy. Why do you feel it is useful to turn the entire population into vassals of the state? Whom does that benefit? I think we know – Galbraith had the answer – the ‘New Class’.
Galbraith’s challenge today
If Galbraith’s critique was relevant in 1958, it is doubly urgent now. Climate breakdown demands massive collective investment in energy, transport, and housing. Ageing societies demand investment in care. Inequality demands redistributive taxation. Yet we are told, relentlessly, that “the money is not there.” Meanwhile, the yachts of the wealthy grow ever larger.
The Galbraith Question stares us in the face: how can a civilisation survive if it allows its collective foundations to crumble while indulging the endless whims of private consumption?
Your own man Keynes answered this – better a man should tyrannise over his bank balance than his fellow citizens. And the society you are advocating has existed. North Korea is the most extreme example of it but there are dozens of others. I doubt you could understand the late Lord Bauer but the policies advocated are what he called the ‘politicization of economic life’ – whereby political power and the ability to reditribute wealth to the governing body becomes the primary goal of economic activity. It’s wholly ruinous, as we are seeing in the UK today with the public sector.
Answering Galbraith
To answer the Galbraith Question, we must reverse the imbalance he described, requiring that we:
All of the above (Certainly health and education) have had huge resources directed to them to have the worst standards , at least arguably in education in the know world. Do they need yet more?
Tax private excess. Wealth, inheritance, and speculative gains must be taxed to fund collective provision.
As Gamecock points out – he hasn’t provided for himself so you have to
Challenge advertising. We must regulate the industries that profit from manufacturing insecurity and demand.
I would ban the public sector from advertising, especially the London mayoral authority but I’d actually (for example) relagalise advertising for tobacco. I used to enjoy the Hamlet adverts…
Redefine prosperity. We must measure success not by consumption of status goods but by the quality of public life.
I’d agree here – I’d measure quality of life by how small the number of regulations in force are and ow few civil servants we have, and the closure of multiple universities alongside cutting massively back on the third sector. Outlaw left wing ideologies and make their adherents chargeable for all their consequences.
Inference
Galbraith’s insight was devastatingly simple: private affluence and public squalor are two sides of the same coin. Markets feed the first and neglect the second. If we allow that imbalance to persist, society itself becomes fragile — glittering on the surface but rotten underneath.
Nationalization of the means of production,, as seen in the UK from 1945 to 1979 and even beyond has been an unmitigated disaster. to say the current malaise is caused by excessive private sector control is a level of delusion that I have only seen possible in a secure institution alongside the one seen in ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s nest’
The Galbraith Question is not about economics alone. It is about what kind of civilisation we want. Do we want one in which the rich wall themselves off in private luxury while the public realm collapses?
Not particularly – then perhaps we had better stop importing third world swan eating savages – may do something to assist in reducing the burden.
Or one in which prosperity is measured by the strength of our shared institutions and the dignity of our common life? That question has, above all else, dominated my economic thinking ever since I first framed it about half a century ago, as a sixth former when I first read The Affluent Society.
Galbraith’s answer was clear. Unless we choose the latter, affluence will prove not the mark of progress but the seed of decline.
‘The strength of our shared institutions’ – perhaps calling everything in the past ‘racist,’sexist’ or various other fashionable leftist words might not be the best idea? What we need is to excise the hideous socialist ideology which dominates so much of our public discourse. I am sorry more people didn’t listen to those Conservatives in the 19th century who warned of the perils of allowing Socialism to rise from the mire. How much happier would the world be without the politics of envy, so clearly enunciated by what President Trump (to coin a phrase) would justifiably describe as a ‘stone cold Loser’
“Billionaires build private rockets while hospitals cannot afford basic equipment.”
Deregulate health, then. Medical equipment is cheap. It’s all the bullshit you have to go through to get it approved.
And I sincerely believe that the billions being poured into satellite internet will bring greater prosperity than luxury healthcare per dollar spent. Not vaccinating against polio or preventing river blindness or patching someone up, but it will do more than treating cancer in old people, per dollar spent. Because sat internet is really cheap. AST Spacemobile are a $23bn company supplying 5G satellite internet to Asia, Europe and the USA. That’s a couple of billion people. So, $10 per person.
“Luxury flats sit empty while homelessness rises.”
There are plenty of empty houses in former mining villages that we could move the homeless to. If you’re just getting pissed, you don’t need to be in London to do that.
“Markets pump out smartphones while public broadband lags.”
And he bought a load of high end fruity stuff, didn’t he? Obviously necessary for the important work of a tre professore.
Where does “public broadband” lag? Most people paying for 50mbps broadband are getting mugged. Most people need about 10mbps. Netflix and Amazon don’t get any better if you have gigabit internet.
The biggest gap in broadband is people half-way up mountains, and well, see point one. Satellite internet.
.
This is total fucking bullshit tho. In the last 125 years or so, Western governments have spaffed more resources on public services than previously thought imaginable. It’s likely the United States alone has spent over a Trillion dollars on *education” and every country or even US state can also point to its own public sector HS2 boondoggles.
Galbraith was just one of those wankers who thought the public were spending their money WRONG, and it needed to be seized from them and spent by “experts”.
Formal education is something like 30% spaffing money up the wall. The KLF burning a million quid was a better use of money than all children having to stay into the 6th form.
Ask yourself: how much of what you spend time on in class after the age of 14 do you use? There’s a load of useful stuff before that. General reading, writing, maths. How to do averages, the different states of matter, how to ask where the railway station is in German.
About the only people who get benefit from school after that are kids who are into science.
And the returns keep diminishing over time. Girls going to university to learn about Elizabethan poetry. What a waste of time and money. That sort of thing should be a hobby. Like blokes who are into Roman history. They go on holiday to France and amongst the days of sitting on a beach, have a look at the Arch of Germanicus or Cassinomagus. My father has a shelful of books about this. Costs about £15-20 a book.
“if affluence produces private luxury alongside public squalor, what does that say”
That the private sector does things better than the public sector?
That politicians and civil servants harm society?
>”Tax private excess. “
Only private excess though. ‘Public’ excess is fine. The temples to the god-state must be magnificent and the high-priests will have their – publicly-owned – estates for their personal use.
No one must be allowed to prosper except through the state – thus the state maintains control over everyone as everyone tries to control the state.
‘Starved’ as in kids calling mommy at work and complaining that they are starving.
Gamecock was in US public schools from 1955 to 1971. In backwater South Carolina. Schools were fully funded. So Galbraith is a lying sack of shit.
BWTM: What does he mean by ‘public services?’ What does he mean by ‘transport?’ And WTF does communities starved of investment mean? It’s just word salad to draw in the useful idiots.
Was Galbraith the first to call government spending ‘investment?’
Commie dick Murphy approaches full blown Marxism. Take from the rich, piss it away, til there is nothing left for anyone.
BTW: Gamecock LOVES his cars, gadgets, and status goods. Why wouldn’t he? Wait . . . that’s what the people want! Not their stupid public services, schools, transport, and communities. They hate capitalism because it gives people what THEY want, not what the totalitarian turds want.