The Vested Interest in Output
FromThe Affluent Society (1958) by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Who is most dependent on the present illusion? Who will be most affected when, under the onslaught of ideas, circumstances and time itself, these matters come to appear in a clearer light?"
Passage:
THE NOTION of a vested interest has an engaging flexibility in our social usage. In ordinary intercourse, it is an improper advantage enjoyed by a political minority to which the speaker does not himself belong. When the speaker himself enjoys it, it ceases to be a vested interest and becomes a hard-won reward. When a vested interest is enjoyed not by a minority but a majority, it is a human right. These conceptual pitfalls notwithstanding, the time has come for a survey of the vested interests in our present attitudes toward production.
The title of producer in our society seems securely honorific. The head of a distillery, a casino or a dog track is a producer. He is not a basic producer which is better, but a producer nonetheless. As such, he enjoys a position in the community as one of its supports or pillars and the sources of its wealth that is not necessarily enjoyed by the high school principal or the parish priest. It is as a producer that the President of General Electric calls on the President of the United States. It is thought good, on the whole, for a department of the government to be in the hands of a production man.
[...]
With fanfare, a program of water conservation was launched. The washing of automobiles, dripping of faucets, sluicing of streets and cooling of air were all prohibited. Presiding over the considerable publicity which these results required was the New York City water commissioner, Mr. Stephen J. Carney. For the time, he was the most important man in the metropolis. His name was on everyone's tongue. Mr. Carney was a public figure. Then the rains came, and the reservoirs filled. Carney was forgotten. One day he was quietly dropped. No one noticed.
Nothing better can be said of any individual than that he knows production. But the prestige of the producer is only the prestige of production. Should production ever come to be taken for granted, so, in some measure, will the producer.
Who is most dependent on the present illusion? Who will be most affected when, under the onslaught of ideas, circumstances and time itself, these matters come to appear in a clearer light? As a general makes a reconnaissance of the opposing forces, the author should know who is dug in against him.
Biography & Abstract
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) was a Canadian-American economist, diplomat, and public intellectual who spent most of his career at Harvard. He served as U.S. Ambassador to India under John F. Kennedy and advised every Democratic president from Roosevelt to Clinton. Prolific, witty, and constitutionally suspicious of received wisdom, he was one of the few economists whose books were read by people who didn't study economics.
The Affluent Society (1958) was Galbraith's most influential work, as an argument that postwar America had grown wealthy while systematically neglecting everything that couldn't be quantified: public education, cultural life, civic infrastructure, the texture of daily experience. He coined the phrase "private affluence, public squalor" to describe what he saw."
The Vested Interest in Output" cuts at something specific: the cultural mythology of the producer. In Galbraith's America, making things, regardless of what was made or for whom, conferred moral authority. The distillery owner and the casino operator ranked above the teacher and the priest because they produced. Culture, by this logic, was decorative at best, wasteful at worst. The question Galbraith leaves hanging: who benefits most from maintaining this illusion?
