In 1958, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote the best-selling book The Affluent Society , in which he argued that the advanced world as typified by the United States had by that year finally emerged from “grim scarcity,” when dire necessity dictated our lives, to a “world of affluence.” He wrote: “So great has been the change [in standards of living] that many of the desires of the individual are no longer even evident to him.