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Primary source: John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 1958.
Caption: John Kenneth Galbraith, a prominent Harvard economist, outlined in this article the necessary balance that should exist between the private and public sectors of the American economy.
The final problem of the productive society is what it produces. This manifests itself in an implacable tendency to provide an opulent supply of some things and a niggardly yield of others. This disparity carries to the point where it is a cause of social discomfort and social unhealth. The line which divides our area of wealth from our area of poverty is roughly which divides privately produced and marketed goods and services from publicly rendered services. Our wealth in the first is not only the startling contrast with the meagerness of the latter, but our wealth in privately produced goods is, to a marked degree, the cause of crisis in the supply of public services. For we have failed to see the importance, indeed the urgent need, of maintaining a balance between the two.
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John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), 251.
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