The Culture of Contentment is an analysis of how the self-interested, short-term perspective of the well-off has shaped modern political and economic culture, especially in the United States. There's nothing really original in what Galbraith has to say — most of it seems obvious if not self-evident, at least to me — but he says it elegantly and, given the current political climate, it obviously needs saying. Galbraith's wry understatement is more damning in a way than more stridently polemical attacks, and is certainly more effective.

July 1995

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