The Affluent Society.

GALBRAITH, John Kenneth.

Item Number: 510

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1958.

First edition of the economist’s landmark work. Octavo. Original cloth with titles to the spine in silver. Inscribed by the author in the year of publication, “To Avis, with much,much love John Galbraith September 1958”. The recipient was book editor Avis Devoto and later confidant to Julia Child. Fine in a near fine dust jacket with very light wear. Listed on Modern Library’s 100 great nonfiction books of the twentieth century.

Galbraith's ideas often addressed the influence of the potential market power of large corporations (Dunn and Pressman, 2005). He believed that corporations could become price makers, rather than price takers, by weakening the accepted principle of consumer sovereignty (Galbraith, 1970). This, in turn, allowed corporations to efficiently increase the production of their goods if they could achieve the strongest market power.