About the Book

In 1998, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote an introduction to the fortieth anniversary edition of The Affluent Society, his 1958 bestseller. He was pleased that “the conventional wisdom,” an expression he’d coined in the book, had “passed into the language.”[1] He said there wasn’t much he’d change if he were writing the book in 1998 instead of 1958. “I would, however, more strongly emphasize, and especially in the United States, the inequality in income and that it is getting worse—that the poor remain poor and the command of income by those in the top income brackets is increasingly egregious. So is the political eloquence and power by which that income is defended. This I did not foresee.”[2]
 
If he were alive today, Galbraith might write an introduction to a sixtieth anniversary edition of his book. In it, he might lament that economic growth and empty consumption as ends in themselves are still part of the conventional wisdom. This would disappoint him, though it might not surprise him. What might surprise him is just how much more unequal American society has become in the 21st century. He would surely ask how the Affluent Society became the “Affluent Minority.” And then, he’d go on to offer a clear-sighted explanation. Sadly, he died in 2006. So, I set out to explore this question for myself.
 
For Galbraith, “the conventional wisdom” meant not only beliefs widely accepted as true, but also those based on outmoded ideas. He encouraged us to challenge the conventional wisdom, to examine its underlying ideas to see if they’re still sound. That’s where I start. I look at the ideas behind politics, money, taxes and work. I also look at economics and the law. But, as these are big systems, I pick a single aspect of each one. For economics, I look just at markets and, for the law, just at corporate law. What I find isn’t so much that the underlying ideas are outdated, though some of them are. Instead I find that they’ve been obscured by complexity and the unintended consequences of having been put into practice. But, more than anything else, they’ve been distorted, even perverted, to serve the selfish interests of those with wealth and power.
 
This gets me thinking about whether there’s a word to describe this—a word for an “inevitable systems screw-up.” There is a word—snafu. It means “a situation marked by errors or confusion.” But its true meaning lies in the ironic acronym it comes from: “situation normal, all fucked up.”[3] It’s the acronym that makes snafu the word I’m looking for.

[1] John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, rev. ed., (London: Penguin Books, 1999), viii.
[2] John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, rev. ed., (London: Penguin Books, 1999), viii and ix.
[3] Merriam-Webster, s.v. “snafu,” https://www.merriam-webster.com/.​
[4] The first use of the word is thought to be in 1941 or 1942. There is an interesting discussion on the origins of the word here: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/68954/researching-the-real-origin-of-snafu. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAFU

​For Galbraith, 'the conventional wisdom' meant not only beliefs widely accepted as true, but also those based on outmoded ideas. 

Given that snafu originated in the U.S. Army during World War II, I take a look at war too.[4] War is, after all, a pretty significant social phenomenon, and there’s method to it. So, I examine some of the ideas behind war.

​Underlying everything we do, including the social systems we build, is human psychology. Our actions depend on the way we think about the world and our place in it. So, what are the ideas in human psychology that explain why we create systems that tend to become snafus? I take a light-hearted stroll through some ideas about “reality” to try to find out.
 
As I do my research, I keep coming back to the role energy plays in human systems. Our social progress was limited when our main sources of energy were our own labor and the energy we took from animals, whether from eating them, using them as beasts of burden or a means of transport, or, in the case of whales, to provide light and heat by burning their oil. When we used wind and water, and when we burnt wood, this was an improvement, because these were sources of energy that were “free.” Human civilization really took off, in a material sense, when we found an absolutely massive source of free energy—when we started to burn nature’s stockpile of fossilized plants—carbon in the form of coal and hydrocarbons in the forms of oil and gas. This happened not that long ago. The Industrial Revolution began in England around 1750, powered by coal. Without coal it couldn’t have happened. Around 100 years later, when whale oil became scarce, the hydrocarbon age began and, along with it, the age of electricity. This super-charged the Industrial Revolution and pretty much every social change since then.
 
From around the 1770s, the development of human society was not just fast--it was exponential. Thanks to fossil fuel energy, it accelerated as never before. This was a game changer for humanity. But, two hundred years later, in the 1970s, economic growth stopped accelerating and began to flatten. The rate of return on energy began to decline. This coincided with the dawning of a realization that our economic progress had become based on a kind of “pump and dump” attitude towards the earth—take its energy and other resources and dump the waste from the things we made with them. It turns out that there’s really no such thing as free energy. There’s always a cost.
 
I have a name for the 200-year period from the 1770s to the 1970s. I call it the ‘Accelerated Age.’ In the final chapter of the book, I examine how the energy intensity of the ‘Accelerated Age’, and the wilfully overlooked costs of burning the fossil fuels that powered it, worsened the snafus I discuss. And I ask whether there’s a way out. I conclude by suggesting that there might be a way out. I don’t have a solution for the snafus—just a few thoughts about an approach to solving them. My aim is to provoke a discussion. I’d like you to read the book and tell me what you think. Seriously, I’d like to know.