ABSTRACT
Galbraith rose to prominence in 1958 with the publication of The Affluent Society (GALBRAITH 1958), in which he argued that American society had come to see an imbalance between its private and public sectors: an imbalance between “private opulence and public squalor”. He accordingly argued that American society was being distorted by corporate power, via advertising, and by the nexus thereby established between goods (or materialism) and happiness. Galbraith objected that orthodox economics failed to deal adequately with what he saw as the self-evident power of the corporate sector and its advertising.
