The sins of affluence: two prominent liberal thinkers offer impassioned critiques of modern capitalism--and solutions that are the policy equivalents of bake sales.

• Author: Galbraith, James K.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber W.W. Norton, 381 pp.

Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben Henry Holt & Company, 261 pp.

Overwritten does not begin to describe Consumed, in which Benjamin Barber takes aim at kid culture, mass market juvenilia, and the infantilization of just about everything in American life. A political theorist, Barber is the Gershon and Carol Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland, and author of sixteen books, including the best-selling Jihad vs. McWorld. Economy is not one of the virtues of his prose. Here's a typical sentence, from a passage on Puritanism in the New World:

Planted on a bounteous new continent and combining the burgeoning new free economy's core values of work, investment and saving with an energetic and enlightened selfishness on behalf of the common good, the ethos was fortified by a spiritual catechism celebrating altruistic toil, ascetic self-denial, deferred gratification, and a devotion to good works and to charity--all laced with an egalitarianism in which work and faith, virtues available to all, generated both worldly and otherworldly rewards. Nothing wrong with it, of course, apart from some things it leaves out, like witch hunts and King Philip's War and the price controls that were a ubiquitous feature of economic regulation in Massachusetts Bay. It's just long. Also, I doubt Barber can document an economics of investment, as distinct from thrift, in colonial North America. Thrift is simply a matter of pinching pennies, but you don't get investment before you have industry, which the colonists did not. Proto-Reaganauts, in short, they weren't.

But Barber is determined that Paradise has been Lost, and on occasion he states this view without guile: "Once upon a time, in capitalism's more creative and successful period, a productivist capitalism prospered by meeting the real needs of real people." The problem is that this is not history. It is, rather, like all sentences that begin "Once upon a time," the stage setting for a fairy tale, a rendition of truths for children. And this is curious, in a book that is, from soup to nuts, a critique of infantilization. Consumed is self-referential. It is, to some degree, an instance of the problem it describes. Barber serves up some of the longest sentences since Proust, yet underneath is largely a simple moral...