New industrial state

John Kenneth Galbraith was once heard to say that he had written The New Industrial State and several other books. This is unduly severe on such modern classics as The Affluent Society, but it makes a major point: This is the noted economist's most impor tant and most influential book.

In The New Industrial State he confronts the strongly established, deeply stylized, and often sadly misleading world of conven tional economic analysis and instruction as it explains or fails to explain the modern world of the great corporation, the trade union, the consumer culture, and the modern state. The result, perhaps the most influential work on economics after Keynes, has had a penetrating effect on orthodox economic thought, one that strongly continues. Across the United States, and elsewhere in a dozen or more translations, students read the regu lar economics textbook and then, by way of correction or amendment, read this volume. Its lucid, effective, and sometimes ironical prose has made it wonderfully available to millions of other readers.

For this edition Professor Galbraith has written a new and greatly engaging intro duction in which he tells of his original inten tion in writing the book, describes the reception by popular critics and academi cians as well as its subsequent effect on eco nomic thought over the past two decades, and offers a few observations on the per sisting tendency toward fossilization of eco nomic ideas. He also points out the unfore seen as well as the predicted changes in economic theory and in the real world that have taken place since the book was first published. Some of these have strengthened his case and some have occasioned changes in argument or emphasis. As ever, the author writes with clarity, precision, and a wide-ranging knowledge of economics and the intruding reality in a way that will pro vide perspective and perhaps amusement for the student and the expert alike.