He was the tallest economist in modern history towering as he did above his peers at almost seven feet. He was Canadian, giving him a unique view of American capitalism.
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
Embodying all the social democratic traditions this country offers as well as our most important export to that country; humour.
His brilliant deployment of subversive weapons -- irony, satire, laughter -- did not always please the more sedate members of his profession. But it vastly pleased the rest of us. Ken used the whiplash phrase and the sardonic thrust for several purposes: to reconnect academic economics, walled off in mathematical equations, with human and social reality; to rebuke the apostles of selfishness and greed; and to give the neglected, the abused and the insulted of our world a better break in life.
JK Galbraith's Towering Spirit
His most definitive work was on the Wall Street Crash as well as his critique of the supply side school of economics of the Von Mises and Hayek and their bastard son Milton Friedman; his most popular book The Affluent Society. It was his smallish 1958 book,
The Affluent Society, that earned Galbraith his popular reknown and professional emnity. Although the thesis was not astoundingly new - having long been argued by
Veblen,
Mitchell and
Knight - his attack on the myth of "consumer sovereignty" went against the cornerstone of mainstream economics and, in many ways, the culturally hegemonic "American way of life".
John Kenneth Galbraith
Forsaking Galbraith's good sense by Rick Salutin
It's too bad John Kenneth Galbraith died last Saturday at 97 — just before the Conservative budget. He'd have been the ideal commentator. He said it all nearly 50 years ago, in The Affluent Society. Today it's called the Humming-Along society as in: “The economy is humming along.”
His thesis was: Despite so much abstract wealth, most citizens in our affluent society lead impoverished lives. That's because the wealth gets frittered away in private consumption while the common goods that render life full — education, health, culture, even the air — are neglected since they tend to be in the public realm. The Harper budget is a fine example. It fritters away the potential in tax breaks to individuals.
In praise of ... JK GalbraithNot that Professor Galbraith exonerated his calling. "Economics," he wrote "is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom." Yet Galbraith was the living refutation of that. Consistently in his lectures and writings he put great themes into the language, themes which lit up the study of economics for those who had never been taught it. The most compelling of these, which even a cursory daily look displays, was the co-existence of private affluence with public squalor.
A second, no less abundantly evident in this age of "must have", was the manufacture by producers of desires which consumers then dutifully come to believe are real needs. A third was the convenient view, so entrenched in the 1980s, that while the rich ought to be given more to make them work harder, giving more to the worst-off would only make them work less. Hypocrisy will sleep more sweetly tonight for the knowledge that Galbraith is no longer around to look down from his very great height and skewer it.
I rather like his quotes on economics. They were like those of GB. Shaw who once said; If all the economists in the world were laid end to end they would still not reach a conclusion.
"Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists"The legacy of JK Galbraith
"In economics", he once said, "the majority is always wrong."He was particularly outspoken about the folly of economic forecasting: "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable." The Wisdom Of JK Galbraith
Who will inherit the mantle of JK Galbraith? Ironically this particular Gaurdian article on Galbraith forgets to mention his son and namesake James Galbraith.His BBC TV series in the seventies, based on writings is also a book; the Age of Uncertainty, showed rows and rows of thousands abandoned tanks in the US at the height of the Viet Nam war, giving a visual image of the very nature of what Schumpeter called creative destruction and what Galbraith called the waste of capitalism, military production.
His New Industrial State (1967) expanded on Galbraith's theory of the firm, arguing that the orthodox theories of the perfectly competitive firm fell far short in analytical power. Firms, Galbraith claimed, were oligopolistic, autonomous institutions vying for market share (and not profit maximization) which wrested power away from owners (entrepreneurs/shareholders), regulators and consumers via conventional means (e.g. vertical integration, advertising, product differentiation) and unconventional ones (e.g. bureaucratization, capture of political favor), etc. Naturally, these were themes already well-espoused in the old American Institutionalist literature, but in the 1960s, they had been apparently forgotten in economics John Kenneth Galbraith
Others have written his obituary even his opponents have been glowing in their faint praise of this great Canadian.
Despite his liberal views, Mr. Galbraith was befriended by conservative intellectuals such as William F. Buckley Jr. and economist Arthur Laffer. "The world is not just made up of people who turn out to be right," Mr. Laffer said. "It is the debate that's critical. ... It is the debate that moves the world forward. And there is no one better to debate than John Kenneth Galbraith."
JK Galbraith's 'genius' recalledJohn Kenneth Galbraith, 1908-2006
J.K. Galbraith, 1908-2006
May 1, 2006
THEY CALL IT the dismal science, but in the hands of John Kenneth Galbraith, economics was neither dismal nor much of a science. He turned his knowledge of economic basics into social criticism for a country that emerged from the sacrifices and privations of the Depression and World War II hell-bent on enjoying its newfound prosperity. ''Technical economists," as he once called them, might win the big prizes, but his wit and the Olympian perspective afforded in part by his 6-foot, 8-inch height won him both millions of readers and the confidence of Democratic presidents like John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton, and would-be presidents like Adlai Stevenson, Eugene McCarthy, and George McGovern.
The worldview of Galbraith, who died Saturday at 97 in Cambridge, was grounded in the waste-not, want-not ethic of an Ontario farm. He used education, first at a local college and then at the University of California at Berkeley, to move from that life to one of government service and a longtime professorship at Harvard. The experience helped to make him a believer in the power of government to use its resources not just to avoid the kind of economic collapse that brought on the Depression but also to create the schools, public transportation, and other civic institutions that can even out social inequality.
Say nothing but good of Galbraith
A theme of the posthumous attack on Galbraith was that monetarism had won the intellectual battle: that Friedman was right and the Keynesian Galbraith wrong. There was also the usual snide stuff that Galbraith, who had set out to be a populariser, was not 'really' an economist - because he did not rely on mathematical models. Well, Galbraith may not have followed modern economics down the narrow paths of econometrics; but he was every inch an economist and was not made president of the American Economic Association for nothing. He was quite simply the most famous, most widely read, most popular (and tallest) economist in the world. For some members of his profession this was, of course, unforgivable.
