PERSON
John Kenneth Galbraith
The economist who named the conventional wisdom, anatomized the planning system, and demonstrated that the most consequential power in a modern economy is the power to define what counts as common sense.
John Kenneth Galbraith was the economist most likely to say what the economics profession preferred not to hear. He coined “
the conventional wisdom”—the phrase entered the language so completely that most people who use it have forgotten he invented it, which is itself the demonstration of his point. He wrote
The Affluent Society in 1958 to argue that the most prosperous economy in human history was producing spectacular private abundance alongside degraded public institutions, and that the conventional wisdom was designed to ensure the pathology went unnoticed. He followed it with
The New Industrial State in 1967, which introduced the
technostructure—the collective of specialists whose indispensable knowledge actually directs large organizations, whatever the official hierarchy says—and the
planning system, the organizations large enough to set the terms on which everyone else operates. The AI economy reproduces the pattern Galbraith identified with an exactness that would have satisfied his appetite for structural irony: extraordinary private capability democratized at the tool