These quotations are from “The Concept of the Conventional Wisdom” in “The Affluent Society” by John Kenneth Galbraith (1958):
The first requirement for an understanding of contemporary economic and social life is a clear view of the relation between events and the ideas that interpret them… Economic life like other social life does not conform to a simple and coherent pattern. On the contrary, it often seems incoherent, inchoate and intellectually frustrating… in the interpretation of all social life, there is a persistent and never-ending competition between what is right and what is merely acceptable…
Just as truth ultimately serves to create a consensus, so in the short run does acceptability. Ideas come to be organized around what the community as a whole or particular audiences find acceptable… As the laboratory worker devotes himself to discovering scientific verities, so the ghost writer and the public relations man concern themselves with identifying the acceptable… Because familiarity is such an important test of acceptability, the acceptable ideas have great stability…
The conventional wisdom is not the property of any political group… The test of what is acceptable is much the same for both liberals and conservatives… The defenders are able to say that the challengers have not mastered their intricacies… There are many reasons why people like to hear articulated that which they approve. It serves the ego: the individual has the satisfaction of knowing that other and more famous people share his conclusions. To hear what he believes is also a source of reassurance…In some measure, the articulation of the conventional wisdom is a religious rite…In general, the articulation of the conventional wisdom is a prerogative of academic, public, or business position…
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events…The fatal blow to the conventional wisdom comes when the conventional ideas fail signally to deal with some contingency to which obsolescence has made them palpably inapplicable. This, sooner or later, must be the fate of ideas which have lost their relation to the world. At this stage, the irrelevance will often be dramatized by some individual. To him will accrue the credit for overthrowing the conventional wisdom and for installing the new ideas…Like the Old Guard, the conventional wisdom dies but does not surrender…
For another generation or more, in all western countries, there were solemn warnings that the notion of a liberal society was a reckless idea. Through the nineteenth century, liberalism in its classical meaning had become the conventional wisdom… The Webbs, Lloyd George, La Follette, Roosevelt, Beveridge and others accepted the new fact of the welfare state, trade unions, social insurance and other social legislation… The conventional wisdom now holds that these measures softened and civilized capitalism and made it tenable. There have never ceased to be warnings that the break with classical liberalism was fatal…
Another interesting instance of the impact of circumstance on the conventional wisdom was that of the balanced budget in times of depression…The shattering circumstance was the Great Depression… In fact, circumstances had already triumphed over the conventional wisdom. By the second year of the Hoover administration, the budget was irretrievably out of balance…
Only posterity is unkind to the man of conventional wisdom, and all posterity does is bury him in a blanket of neglect. However, more serious issues are at stake… No society seems ever to have succumbed to boredom. Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace. The conventional wisdom protects the community in social thought and action, but there are even grave drawbacks and even dangers in a system of thought which, by its very nature and design, avoids accommodation to circumstances until change is dramatically forced upon it.
In large areas of economic affairs, the march of events – above all, the increase in our wealth and our popular well-being- has again left the conventional wisdom sadly obsolete… I am not wholly barren of hope, for circumstances have been dealing the conventional wisdom a new series of heavy blows. It is only after such damage has been done, as we have seen, that ideas have their opportunity.
Keynes, in his most famous observation, noted that we are ruled by ideas and by very little else. In the immediate sense, this is true. And he was right in attributing importance to ideas as opposed to the simple influence of pecuniary vested interest. But the rule of ideas is only powerful in a world that does not change. Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but, as I may note once more, to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend.