Steve Jobs and John Kenneth Galbraith on the Dependence Effect
By Randall Holcombe • Monday October 10, 2011 1:23 PM PDT • 2 Comments
John Kenneth Galbraith coined the term “dependence effect” in his 1958 book, The Affluent Society. Galbraith argues against satisfying a person’s demands for goods that are “...contrived for him. And above all, they must not be contrived by the process of production by which they are satisfied. ... One cannot defend production as satisfying wants if that production creates the wants.”
In a 1998 interview in Business Week, Steve Jobs said “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” As Jobs saw it, producing goods like the iPhone and iPad created consumer demand for them, through the very process Galbraith criticized. The demand for those products were “contrived” by Apple’s producing them. Nobody would want an iPad if Apple hadn’t made them.
It is easy to fall toward Jobs’s side on this, because of all the great products Jobs created at Apple that we didn’t know we wanted until he showed us. Friedrich Hayek took issue with Galbraith’s dependence effect in 1961, arguing that “to say that a desire is not important because it is not innate is to say that the whole cultural achievement of man is not important.” So, I’m not the first to find fault with Galbraith’s dependence effect. Hayek did that 50 years ago. But this does seem like a good time to bring up Jobs’s comment, less than a week after his passing. His observation is a small example of what was behind his entrepreneurial genius.
Tags: Austrian School of economics, Business, Culture, Economics, Entrepreneurship, Technology 
Its amazing how the Elites,represented by Mr.Galbraith among others,think they know whats best for the average American. I just love to be talked down to by people who probably never worked at a real job in their lives and never ever ran a business. According to Mr.Galbraith,who I believe was a socialist economist, we don’t need cars,modern plumbing,air conditioning,TVs,or any of the thousand of products that have come about in the last 125 years or so. If it was up to the Galbraiths of today,we would still be living in mud huts on the prairie doing subsistence farming.
Libertarian Jerry | Oct 13, 2011 | Reply
To say that Galbraith is wrong is to misunderstand the great economist. He was not against consumption per se, but the type whether it enriches your life culturally and socially and the community or is destructive.
Fast food has made many Americans fat and unhealthy, but it is also enjoyable for millions of Americans. The mass marketing of fast food is driving consumption. No one can deny this.
If fast food was not heavily advertised and so cheap, would we be eating so much? People tend to be very selective when quoting Galbraith. You need to read the whole of his work, which is very complex, to understand the forces that dominate the lives of ordinary people, political and economic
tiger moto | Dec 9, 2011 | Reply