The Affluent Society
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The Affluent Society
''The Affluent Society'' is a 1958 (4th edition revised 1984) book by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. The book sought to clearly outline the manner in which the post– World War II United States was becoming wealthy in the private sector but remained poor in the public sector, lacking social and physical infrastructure, and perpetuating income disparities. The book sparked much public discussion at the time. It is also credited with popularizing the term " conventional wisdom". Many of the ideas presented were later expanded and refined in Galbraith's 1967 book, '' The New Industrial State''. Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich called it his favorite on the subject of economics. The Modern Library placed the book at no. 46 on its list of the top 100 English-language non-fiction books of the 20th century. Themes * The "central tradition" in economics, created by Adam Smith and expanded by David Ricardo and Thomas Robert Malthus in the late eighteenth ...
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John Kenneth Galbraith
John Kenneth Galbraith (October 15, 1908 – April 29, 2006), also known as Ken Galbraith, was a Canadian-American economist, diplomat, public official, and intellectual. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s. As an economist, he leaned toward post-Keynesian economics from an institutionalist perspective. Galbraith was a long-time Harvard faculty member and stayed with Harvard University for half a century as a professor of economics. He was a prolific author and wrote four dozen books, including several novels, and published more than a thousand articles and essays on various subjects. Among his works was a trilogy on economics, ''American Capitalism'' (1952), ''The Affluent Society'' (1958), and '' The New Industrial State'' (1967). Some of his work has been criticized by economists Milton Friedman, Paul Krugman, Robert Solow, and Thomas Sowell. Galbraith was active in Democratic Party politics, serving in the administrations of ...
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Luxury Goods
In economics, a luxury good (or upmarket good) is a good for which demand increases more than what is proportional as income rises, so that expenditures on the good become a greater proportion of overall spending. Luxury goods are in contrast to necessity goods, where demand increases proportionally less than income. ''Luxury goods'' is often used synonymously with '' superior goods''. Definition The word "luxury" originated from the Latin word ''luxuria'', which means exuberance, excess, or abundance. A luxury good can be identified by comparing the demand for the good at one point in time against the demand for the good at a different point in time, at a different income level. When personal income increases, demand for luxury goods increases even more than income does. Conversely, when personal income decreases, demand for luxury goods drops even more than income does. For example, if income rises 1%, and the demand for a product rises 2%, then the product is a luxury go ...
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1950s In The United States
Year 195 ( CXCV) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Scrapula and Clemens (or, less frequently, year 948 ''Ab urbe condita''). The denomination 195 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years. Events By place Roman Empire * Emperor Septimius Severus has the Roman Senate deify the previous emperor Commodus, in an attempt to gain favor with the family of Marcus Aurelius. * King Vologases V and other eastern princes support the claims of Pescennius Niger. The Roman province of Mesopotamia rises in revolt with Parthian support. Severus marches to Mesopotamia to battle the Parthians. * The Roman province of Syria is divided and the role of Antioch is diminished. The Romans annexed the Syrian cities of Edessa and Nisibis. Severus re-establish his h ...
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1940s In The United States
Year 194 ( CXCIV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Septimius and Septimius (or, less frequently, year 947 ''Ab urbe condita''). The denomination 194 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years. Events By place Roman Empire * Emperor Septimius Severus and Decimus Clodius Septimius Albinus Caesar become Roman Consuls. * Battle of Issus: Septimius Severus marches with his army (12 legions) to Cilicia, and defeats Pescennius Niger, Roman governor of Syria. Pescennius retreats to Antioch, and is executed by Severus' troops. * Septimius Severus besieges Byzantium (194–196); the city walls suffer extensive damage. Asia * Battle of Yan Province: Warlords Cao Cao and Lü Bu fight for control over Yan Province; the battle lasts for over 100 d ...
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Books By John Kenneth Galbraith
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is ''codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called ...
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1958 In Economics
Events January * January 1 – The European Economic Community (EEC) comes into being. * January 3 – The West Indies Federation is formed. * January 4 ** Edmund Hillary's Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition completes the third overland journey to the South Pole, the first to use powered vehicles. ** Sputnik 1 (launched on October 4, 1957) falls to Earth from its orbit, and burns up. * January 13 – Battle of Edchera: The Moroccan Army of Liberation ambushes a Spanish patrol. * January 27 – A Soviet-American executive agreement on cultural, educational and scientific exchanges, also known as the " Lacy–Zarubin Agreement", is signed in Washington, D.C. * January 31 – The first successful American satellite, Explorer 1, is launched into orbit. February * February 1 – Egypt and Syria unite, to form the United Arab Republic. * February 6 – Seven Manchester United F.C., Manchester United footballers are among the 21 people killed in the Munich air disast ...
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1958 Non-fiction Books
Events January * January 1 – The European Economic Community (EEC) comes into being. * January 3 – The West Indies Federation is formed. * January 4 ** Edmund Hillary's Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition completes the third overland journey to the South Pole, the first to use powered vehicles. ** Sputnik 1 (launched on October 4, 1957) falls to Earth from its orbit, and burns up. * January 13 – Battle of Edchera: The Moroccan Army of Liberation ambushes a Spanish patrol. * January 27 – A Soviet-American executive agreement on cultural, educational and scientific exchanges, also known as the " Lacy–Zarubin Agreement", is signed in Washington, D.C. * January 31 – The first successful American satellite, Explorer 1, is launched into orbit. February * February 1 – Egypt and Syria unite, to form the United Arab Republic. * February 6 – Seven Manchester United footballers are among the 21 people killed in the Munich air disaster in West Germany, on ...
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Original Affluent Society
The "original affluent society" is the proposition that argues that the lives of hunter-gatherers can be seen as embedding a sufficient degree of material comfort and security to be considered affluent. The theory was first put forward in a paper presented by Marshall Sahlins at a famous symposium in 1966 entitled 'Man the Hunter'. Sahlins observes that affluence is the satisfaction of wants, "which may be 'easily satisfied' either by producing much or desiring little." Given a culture characterized by limited wants, Sahlins argued that hunter-gatherers were able to live 'affluently' through the relatively easy satisfaction of their material needs. At the time of the symposium new research by anthropologists, such as Richard B. Lee's work on the !Kung of southern Africa, was challenging popular notions that hunter-gatherer societies were always near the brink of starvation and continuously engaged in a struggle for survival. Sahlins gathered the data from these studies and used ...
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Hunter-gatherer
A traditional hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living an ancestrally derived lifestyle in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local sources, especially edible wild plants but also insects, fungi, honey, or anything safe to eat, and/or by hunting game (pursuing and/or trapping and killing wild animals, including catching fish), roughly as most animal omnivores do. Hunter-gatherer societies stand in contrast to the more sedentary agricultural societies, which rely mainly on cultivating crops and raising domesticated animals for food production, although the boundaries between the two ways of living are not completely distinct. Hunting and gathering was humanity's original and most enduring successful competitive adaptation in the natural world, occupying at least 90 percent of human history. Following the invention of agriculture, hunter-gatherers who did not change were displaced or conquered by farming or pastoralist ...
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Marshall Sahlins
Marshall David Sahlins ( ; December 27, 1930April 5, 2021) was an American cultural anthropologist best known for his ethnographic work in the Pacific and for his contributions to anthropological theory. He was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.Moore, Jerry D. 2009. "Marshall Sahlins: Culture Matters" in ''Visions of Culture: an Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists'', Walnut Creek, California: Altamira, pp. 365-385. Biography Marshall Sahlins was born in Chicago, the son of Bertha (Skud) and Paul A. Sahlins. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants. His father was a doctor while his mother was a homemaker. He grew up in a secular, non-practicing family. His family claims to be descended from Baal Shem Tov, a mystical rabbi considered to be the founder of Hasidic Judaism. Sahlins' mother admired Emma Goldman and was a political activist as a child in Russia. Sahlins ...
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History Of Economic Thought
History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of these events. Historians seek knowledge of the past using historical sources such as written documents, oral accounts, art and material artifacts, and ecological markers. History is not complete and still has debatable mysteries. History is also an academic discipline which uses narrative to describe, examine, question, and analyze past events, and investigate their patterns of cause and effect. Historians often debate which narrative best explains an event, as well as the significance of different causes and effects. Historians also debate the nature of history as an end in itself, as well as its usefulness to give perspective on the problems of the ...
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New Class
New class is used as a polemic term by critics of countries that followed the Soviet-type Communism to describe the privileged ruling class of bureaucrats and Communist party functionaries which arose in these states. Generally, the group known in the Soviet Union as the nomenklatura conforms to the theory of the new class. The term was earlier applied to other emerging strata of the society. Milovan Đilas' new-class theory was also used extensively by anti-communist commentators in the Western world in their criticism of the Communist states during the Cold War. '' Red bourgeoisie'' is a pejorative synonym for the term new class, crafted by leftist critics and movements like the 1968 student demonstrations in Belgrade. New class is also used as a term in late 1960s post-industrial sociology. Milovan Đilas' analysis A theory of the new class was developed by Milovan Đilas the Vice President of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito, who pa ...
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