{"id":940,"date":"2006-05-04T05:38:12","date_gmt":"2006-05-04T10:38:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/940\/"},"modified":"2006-05-04T05:38:51","modified_gmt":"2006-05-04T10:38:51","slug":"940","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/940","title":{"rendered":"Effluent Society"},"content":{"rendered":"

George Will takes down the legacy of John Kenneth Galbraith<\/a> as an excuse for condescension, while making time to bash John McCain:<\/p>\n

Advertising, Galbraith argued, was a leading cause of America’s “private affluence and public squalor.” By that he meant Americans’ consumerism, which produced their deplorable reluctance to surrender more of their income to taxation, trusting government to spend it wisely.<\/p>\n

If advertising were as potent as Galbraith thought, the advent of television — a large dose of advertising, delivered to every living room — should have caused a sharp increase in consumption relative to savings. No such increase coincided with the arrival of television, but Galbraith, reluctant to allow empiricism to slow the flow of theory, was never a martyr to Moynihan’s axiom that everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Enjoy.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

George Will takes down the legacy of John Kenneth Galbraith as an excuse for condescension, while making time to bash John McCain: Advertising, Galbraith argued, was a leading cause of America’s “private affluence and public squalor.” By that he meant Americans’ consumerism, which produced their deplorable reluctance to surrender more of their income to taxation, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Effluent Society”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics-implicit"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s4C7K-940","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":931,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/because-they-cant","url_meta":{"origin":940,"position":0},"title":"Because they can’t","author":"Gil","date":"April 30, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"John Kenneth Galbraith died this weekend. The NYTimes has a long obit, including the entertaining caveat: He strived to change the very texture of the national conversation about power and its nature in the modern world by explaining how the planning of giant corporations superseded market mechanisms. His sweeping ideas,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Politics (implicit)"","block_context":{"text":"Politics (implicit)","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/politics-implicit"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":938,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/one-shot-at-history","url_meta":{"origin":940,"position":1},"title":"One Shot at History","author":"Gil","date":"May 3, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"I find the figure of Lee Harvey Oswald fascinating. The more facts we know, the less of a complete picture we get of the guy. Ron Rosenbaum has a neat essay on the JFK assassination theorists in his big collection, The Secret Parts of Fortune, that (to me) forms a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Politics (explicit)"","block_context":{"text":"Politics (explicit)","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/politics-explicit"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5519,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/ad-it-update","url_meta":{"origin":940,"position":2},"title":"Ad It Update","author":"Gil","date":"August 7, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"A day after I finished my ramble about how advertising tends not to get mentioned in articles about The Future Of Magazines, I read the following passage in Holy Terror, Bob Colacello's \"insider's portrait\" of Andy Warhol. Mr. Colacello ran Interview magazine for about 11 years, shortly after its launch.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=virtualmemories-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B000IWB7PM","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1105,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/whats-an-interweb","url_meta":{"origin":940,"position":3},"title":"What’s an interweb?","author":"Gil","date":"September 7, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Big off-site sales meeting today, to discuss online sales strategies for the company. I'm not in sales, but they brought me in (along with our VP\/editorial director) to give some perspective on how the editors can contribute good web-based content. It was a critical meeting, in which we hammered out\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":581,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/corporate-synergy","url_meta":{"origin":940,"position":4},"title":"Corporate Synergy?","author":"Gil","date":"July 28, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"This morning, I read a neat article about co-op advertising in bookstores (better known as \"pay for play\", which helps insure that deep-pocketed publishers get the most exposure for their books).Then, on a whim, I hit Amazon's \"most-preordered books in Literature and Fiction,\" when I came across this. Evidently, The\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "literature"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":16581,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-573-david-thomson","url_meta":{"origin":940,"position":5},"title":"Episode 573 – David Thomson","author":"Gil","date":"January 23, 2024","format":"audio","excerpt":"Virtual Memories Show 573: David Thomson \"Our use of television now is different than in its first 50 or so years, because it's saying to us now, 'You do realize you're alone in this world and that the sense of authority you had in the medium is not longer there.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Art"","block_context":{"text":"Art","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/art"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/thomson2024comp.jpg?fit=1050%2C800&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/thomson2024comp.jpg?fit=1050%2C800&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/thomson2024comp.jpg?fit=1050%2C800&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/thomson2024comp.jpg?fit=1050%2C800&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/thomson2024comp.jpg?fit=1050%2C800&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}