CONCEPT
The Revised Sequence
Galbraith's inversion of the orthodox market flow—his demonstration that in the modern economy the producer does not respond to the consumer’s pre-existing wants but creates, through advertising and salesmanship, the very desires it then claims to be satisfying.
The standard picture of a market economy runs in one direction: consumers have wants, producers compete to satisfy them, and the sovereign consumer's preferences drive everything downstream.
John Kenneth Galbraith called this the original sequence and argued, in
The New Industrial State (1967), that in the mature industrial economy the flow had been reversed. A large organization that plans its production, its investment, and its technology years in advance cannot afford to wait to see what consumers will want; it must ensure they will want what it has planned to produce. The apparatus of persuasion—advertising, salesmanship, engineered obsolescence, the cultivation of status anxiety—is not a luxury added to the production system but a structural necessity of it. This reversal he called the revised sequence, and it is the mechanism behind the
dependence effect: the producer creates the wants the production system then satisfies, so that the sovereign consumer of economic theory is, in the affluent and