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While The Space Merchants indicates, as Kingsley Amis has correctly observed, some of the `` impending consequences of the growth of industrial and commercial power '' and satirizes `` existing habits in the advertising profession '', its warning and analysis penetrate much deeper.

What is wrong with advertising is not only that it is an `` outrage, an assault on people's mental privacy '' or that it is a major cause for a wasteful economy of abundance or that it contains a coercive tendency ( which is closer to the point ).

Rather what Kornbluth and Pohl are really doing is warning against the dangers inherent in perfecting `` a science of man and his motives ''.

The Space Merchants, like such humanist documents as Joseph Wood Krutch's The Measure Of Man and C. S. Lewis's The Abolition Of Man, considers what may result from the scientific study of human nature.

If man is actually the product of his environment and if science can discover the laws of human nature and the ways in which environment determines what people do, then someone -- a someone probably standing outside traditional systems of values -- can turn around and develop completely efficient means for controlling people.

Thus we will have a society consisting of the planners or conditioners, and the controlled.

And this, of course, is exactly what Madison Avenue has been accused of doing albeit in a primitive way, with its `` hidden persuaders '' and what the space merchants accomplish with much greater sophistication and precision.