An affluent society is form of

society A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Soc ...

characterized by material abundance for broad segments of the population. A typical image for the affluent society is the literary topos of the

Cockaigne Cockaigne or Cockayne () is a land of plenty in medieval myth, an imaginary place of extreme luxury and ease where physical comforts and pleasures are always immediately at hand and where the harshness of medieval peasant life does not exist. ...

, a mythical land of

luxury goods In economics, a luxury good (or upmarket good) is a good (economics), good for which demand (economics), demand increases more than what is proportional as income rises, so that expenditures on the good become a greater proportion of overall spend ...

. Similar terms, used more in a negative context, are

throw-away society The throw-away society is a generalised description of human social concept strongly influenced by consumerism, whereby the society tends to use items once only, from disposable packaging, and consumer products are not designed for reuse or life ...

and

consumer society Consumerism is a social and economic order that encourages the acquisition of goods and services in ever-increasing amounts. With the Industrial Revolution, but particularly in the 20th century, mass production led to overproduction—the su ...

History of the term

A popular description of the land of

is found in 14th century Ireland as the eponymous poem ''The Land of Cokaygne'', which was a fictional country located to the west of Spain. The concept of the affluent society was borrowed from an economic work by the U.S. economist

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 t ...

called ''

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 s ...

'' and appears only sporadically in sociological or socio-critical works.

Poverty in affluent societies

Open poverty in the U.S. entered the public consciousness in 1962 with the book by the left-wing Catholic

Michael Harrington Edward Michael Harrington Jr. (February 24, 1928 – July 31, 1989) was an American democratic socialist. As a writer, he was perhaps best known as the author of '' The Other America''. Harrington was also a political activist, theorist, profess ...

The Other America ''The Other America'' () is Michael Harrington's best known and likely most influential book. He was an American democratic socialist, writer, political activist, political theorist, professor of political science, radio commentator, and foundin ...

''. He found 50 million poor people in a country of then 200 million inhabitants, who had also escaped

social science Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of s ...

because it had assumed that they simply could not exist. With the strengthening of the

civil rights movement The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social and political movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized institutional racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement throughout the Unite ...

and the slogan of the

Great Society The Great Society was a set of domestic programs in the United States launched by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964–65. The term was first coined during a 1964 commencement address by President Lyndon B. Johnson at the Universit ...

under President

Lyndon B. Johnson Lyndon Baines Johnson (; August 27, 1908January 22, 1973), often referred to by his initials LBJ, was an American politician who served as the 36th president of the United States from 1963 to 1969. He had previously served as the 37th vice ...

, this previously overlooked aspect of U.S. society finally entered the consciousness of politicians. For example, Gabriel Kolko's thorough study of income and wealth distribution over several decades found a stable persistence of poverty, and even rather a tendency for the poorer class to grow.

Gabriel Kolko Gabriel Morris Kolko (August 17, 1932 – May 19, 2014) was an American historian. His research interests included American capitalism and political history, the Progressive Era, and U.S. foreign policy in the 20th century. One of the best-known ...

: ''Wealth and Power in America. An Analysis of Social Class and Income Distribution'', New York 162, 1964. Accordingly, Kolko considers the thesis of a middle-class society to be empirically refuted. The work of Simon Smith Kuznets had often served as the basis for the latter thesis. This study, however, was limited to the 5 percent of the population with the highest

per capita income Per capita income (PCI) or total income measures the average income earned per person in a given area (city, region, country, etc.) in a specified year. It is calculated by dividing the area's total income by its total population. Per capita i ...

. A more recent study also finds that poverty is a complex phenomenon whose trends and boundaries shift over time, both in absolute terms and in relative terms, but for which causes are very difficult to pin down. In principle, however, it should be clear that a solution to the social problem cannot be expected through market processes alone. Critics of the affluent society, such as the Indian Germanist Saral Sarkar, see economism (dominance of the economy) as the basis for the processes of the affluent society. Sarkar calls for refusal to consume as a

countermeasure A countermeasure is a measure or action taken to counter or offset another one. As a general concept, it implies precision and is any technological or tactical solution or system designed to prevent an undesirable outcome in the process. The fi ...

.Saral Sarkar: ''Ecosocialism or ecocapitalism? A critical analysis of humanity's fundamental choices'', Zed Books, London/New York, 1999.

Literature

: ''

'', 1958. * Saral Sarkar: ''Ecosocialism or ecocapitalism? A critical analysis of humanity's fundamental choices'', Zed Books, London/New York, 1999.

References

{{Aspects of capitalism Consumerism Society

History of the term

Poverty in affluent societies

Literature

See also

References