Recently it's books at the intersection of economics and political philosophy which have been on my reading list, as research for my own forthcoming works – a publication on Public Value for the BBC Trust, discussing how we put the principle into action, and my forthcoming magnum opus for Princeton University Press.

So, having dipped into Galbraith's The Great Crash of 1929, and quite liking that, I turned this week to The Affluent Society. It reminded me how much in general I don't like Galbraith's books. Certainly, he gave us some memorable phrases  – conventional wisdom, private affluence and public squalor. And on the face of it, this is very much another title for our own times, with the conspicuous consumerism of the boom giving way to the nightmare public finances of the crash, not to mention degraded public realm in some western societies. Even so, The Affluent Society is a disappointing book.

Why? It's full of swipes against conventional economics, which might help explain my reaction. It also attacks, in an equally unreasoned and unevidenced way, big business, and is the forerunner of all of today's ideological diatribes against multinationals such as Noreena Hertz's truly atrocious Silent Takeover or Naomi Klein's somewhat better No Logo. I give Galbraith much credit for his early awareness of environmental problems but he didn't build on it constructively. This is a negative book, like the modern anti-capitalist literature: against growth, against business, and for active redistribution of incomes which – certainly if the pie has to shrink – is nothing more than class war posturing.  (Yes, also back in fashion, at least here in the UK.)

But there's more to it than that. The Affluent Society is not analytical. It does not present arguments supported by evidence. It's a long rant with many non sequiturs and no clear flow of logic through the book. There is masses of rhetoric instead, but written in the most Latinate and ponderous style. I gave up counting the number of double negatives, for instance, one of Galbraith's favourite techniques for sounding impressive (I guess) – but in fact pompous and obfuscatory. Why does he have a reputation for being such a good writer? The book is in fact a hard slog, from which a few soundbites shine out of the page.

Of course, the book was and is a huge success, so millions of people see something in it that I don't. But I wonder how many in fact read it – or was it an equivalent to A Brief History of Time, which lingers unread on so many shelves?