In The Affluent Society, (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1958: 11–12), John Kenneth Galbraith writes: “Scholars gather in scholarly assemblages to hear in elegant statement what we have all heard before. Yet it is not a negligible rite, for its purpose is not to convey knowledge but to beatify learning and the learned.” Mike Berry's The Affluent Society Revisited beatifies Galbraith. In 204 pages of commentary and exegesis, Berry applies Galbraith's arguments to what has happened since The Affluent Society was published. I sympathize with the fact that there is much that that has to be left out of a 204 page book aimed at non-specialists, but Berry's arguments are limited and ultimately unpersuasive.

He is subtly and sometimes not-so-subtly insulting, as in his claim that general much economics “assumed the character of scholastic arguments reminiscent of the medieval monastery” and his characterization of members of the “new petty bourgeoisie” (emphasis in original) as “the storm troops of the Tea Party, just as the real storm troopers once empowered the National Socialists in Germany during the Great Depression” (p. 59). On page 132, defenders of free markets are compared to the sheep from George Orwell's Animal Farm.

The Affluent Society and The Affluent Society Revisited both suffer from a poverty of the economic imagination. Galbraith and Berry are confident that they know what people should want. Galbraith throughout simply asserts that roads, schools, and so on are the proper domain of government: they would not be provided appropriately if left to the private sector. In the same year Galbraith published The Affluent Society, James Buchanan and William Stubblebine published what should be a classic article simply titled “Externality” (Economica 29 [November 1962]: 371–384) in which they reevaluated the conventional wisdom about externalities—asking what we are to say if the externalities are inframarginal. Berry does not consider alternatives to state provision of poor relief like that documented by David Beito (From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and John Murray (Origins of American Health Insurance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

Berry gives Coase a mention (p. 146) but dismisses his insight in order to concentrate on Galbraith's advice to those in the government who better need to persuade the public of the need for more government-provided goods. Berry ignores marginal reasoning on page 63, asking whether we are living riotously as a result of government pension schemes. At the margin at least someone is less careful as a result. Furthermore, there is an argument by Scott Beaulier and Bryan Caplan that behavioral economics undermines the case for the welfare state that should be part of this discussion (“Behavioral Economics and Perverse Effects of the Welfare State,” Kyklos 60, no. 4 [2007]: 485–507).

Berry makes reference to Austrian economics (p. 98), Virginia political economy in the tradition of James Buchanan (pp. 135–36), and Ronald Coase (p. 146), but he does not go far beyond stating that these are traditions skeptical of government intervention. This is unfortunate because economists writing in these traditions are, like Galbraith and Berry, deeply skeptical of the too-tight nexus between states and firms but, in my opinion, better equipped to understand it.

Berry includes as an epigraph the opening lines of Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments. A better selection might have been Smith's insufficiently-famous passage in Theory about The Man of System, because it exemplifies the Galbraithian worldview. The Affluent Society Revisited is a useful foray into Galbraith studies, and readers will learn much about how Galbraith and his interpreters have viewed the world. At the end of the book, Berry asks whether H.G. Wells's hero would have taken The Affluent Society into his time machine as he went to save the world, and answers in the negative. Just as Wells's hero would not need The Affluent Society to save the world, readers will not need The Affluent Society Revisited in order to understand it.