BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : A Map to a More Democratic Society : THE GOOD SOCIETY: The Humane Agenda by John Kenneth Galbraith; Houghton Mifflin$22.95, 143 pages

“In the modern economy . . . production is now more necessary for the employment it provides than for the goods and services it supplies.” With this lapidary observation on Page 3 of his new book, John Kenneth Galbraith demonstrates that at 87 he has lost none of the incisive dry wit that has made him a pleasure to read for nearly half a century.

“The Republican majority that came to legislative power after the 1994 election,” he writes, “was committed to the exceptionally rigorous doctrine formally designated as the ‘contract with America,’ present-day equivalent in inspiration if not in content of ‘The Communist Manifesto.’ ”

Galbraith deplores such “escapes from thought into rhetoric,” whether on the right or left, and argues that political and economic action must be based not on ideology but on “the ruling facts of the specific case.” He notes with satisfaction the Republicans’ emerging “retreat” from “controlling doctrine” and the “intervention of practical judgment,” which is necessary to preserve “social decency and compassion.”

Those virtues have always been at the core of Galbraith’s thought. This elegant short book is a lucid summary of what he conceives the good society to be, with some suggestions about how to get there.

Galbraith advocates here, as he has always, an approach of robust liberalism. Government must do on behalf of all what men and women cannot do alone for themselves. It must care for those who cannot care for themselves. It must regulate capitalism for the common good.

At the center of the good society in the modern industrial state, Galbraith places education. For economic reasons, certainly: He observes that no illiterate society was ever rich, nor a literate one, poor. But more than that.

Education, he argues, is necessary for the enjoyment of life and indeed for the survival of democracy itself. Who could disagree? But how many people will try to avoid acknowledging his necessary corollary:

“There is no test of the good society so clear, so decisive, as its willingness to tax--to forgo private income, expenditure and the expensively cultivated superfluities of private consumption--in order to develop and sustain a strong educational system for all its citizens.”

By this test contemporary America has failed badly. Yet many people deny that it has failed, arguing evasively and absurdly that there is no correlation between the money spent on schools and the education they produce. Galbraith’s clarity of expression is his greatest gift to us. He states the obvious memorably.

Although he writes with the vigor of an optimist, Galbraith says that in fact he has become pessimistic.

“Because in the modern polity there are two groups that are unequal in power and influence, democracy has become an imperfect thing.

”. . . There are the favored, the affluent and the rich, not excluding the corporate bureaucracy and the business interest, and on the other, the socially and economically deprived, along with the considerable number who, out of concern and compassion, come to their support.”

The problem is that the poor do not vote. Induce them to vote, and the good society “would be a bright and wholly practical prospect.” It would also, not incidentally, be Democratic. Galbraith urges the party he has served since President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration to forget about bidding for the support of “the comfortable and the rich.” They “will always vote for the party that most strongly affirms its service to their pecuniary well-being. This is and has always been the Republicans.

“The Democrats have no future as a low-grade substitute.”