John Galbraith Summary

There are many major themes that John Galbraith comes back to several times in Essential Galbraith but I will only focus on three of them. They are countervailing power, conventional wisdom, and consumer sovereignty. Countervailing power is describe by Galbraith as a something that happened when substantial buyers in certain markets would get price concessions from the suppliers. Galbraith believed this was important because the power of larger firms were offset by the countervailing power of the unions, which in turn gave consumers more options and forced larger forms to have competitors. “They appeared not on the same side of the market but on the opposite side…with customers or suppliers.” This quote from Essential Galbraith describes how

21). After this sentence, he begins to describe what are familiar to liberals and conservatives. He states that conservatives are “led by disposition…to adhere to the familiar and the established” while the liberals “bring moral fervor and passion…to ideas that he is most familiar” ” (Essential Galbraith, p. 21). He states that is where the test of acceptability is for the conservative but no for the liberal. He mentions that “deviation in the form of originality is condemned as faithlessness or backsliding…a good liberal is one who is adequately predictable” (Essential Galbraith, p. 21). This is interesting because he is describing what conventional wisdom means to different people. One sentence that seem to struck out to me was “we are ruled by ideas and by very little else” (Essential Galbraith, p. 30). This is something to think about because it is true. We as a society like to hear people’s ideas so we can see if they fit ours, we like to be able to agree and disagree with people based on what we like. Ideas contribute to many of the operations that go on in our society and help us determine what will out next move be. So, in a way, we are separated as conservative and liberals. Some of us are good with just a person’s deposition but some of us what more security to make sure that there will be no deriving from the agreed