Galbraith and Consumer Sovereignty

PROFESSOR GALBRAITH, one suspects, finds economics somewhat boring. His heart is with aesthetics. Both in The Affluent Society and in the Reith lectures the central suggestion is that the problems of scarcity and uncertainty have now been solved, and that our attention should be given to the beauty of our cities, the cleanliness of our air, and the quality of our education. The need is no longer to satisfy the individual desires of the consumer, but to improve the amenities of the community. In so far as Professor Galbraith is making a value judgment about the good society, we can all go part of the way with him. We might all get more total satisfaction if we spent more of our resources on getting rid of pollution, on providing more and better education, and on making the centres of our northern towns attractive. We are all tempted to spend too much on those commodities which satisfy a strong immediate want, like alcohol or tobacco, and too little on those which improve the environment in which we live, like parks and safety. We even recognize this limitation in ourselves. As voters, we express our mistrust of ourselves as consumers. We support a policy which taxes beer and petrol and toilet soap in order to make education free. Yet, if we could trust our own sense of perspective, it might be simpler for most citizens to pay for the education of their children with the money they would save by not having to pay taxes on their beer and petrol and toilet soap. It is because we are not sure that we would use the money saved to buy education, and not more and more beer and petrol and toilet soap that we go through all the administrative contortions of subsidizing education and taxing beer and petrol and toilet soap. One can of course argue about who constitutes 'we' in this context; to some extent the subsidy is not just from petrol or beer or toilet soap to education, but from one section of the community to another. Most people, however, both pay the taxes and get the subsidy, yet the idea of basing the supply of education upon the demand for it, as expressed by the fees parents would pay, has not been accepted by any political party of importance in the western world. Obviously, there are some things which, at the straight market price, we would buy more of than we think is good for us, and others of which we would buy less. So we use our power as