“I am not quite sure what the advantage is in having a few more dollars to spend, if the air is too dirty to breathe, the streets are filthy and the schools bad”
– John Kenneth Galbraith
The economist, John Kenneth Galbraith died yesterday, aged 97. Something of a hero here at Tuppenceworth, Galbraith was a Canadian and an American, an academic, historian, novelist, art critic, memoirist, Ambassador to India, Reith Lecturer, public servant, television presenter, Professor at both Harvard and Cambridge and, he questionably claimed, “the tallest man in the world”. His most famous work, The Affluent Society coined the phrase “conventional wisdom”. When asked for his views on Richard Nixon, he replied “I never met him, but apparently he worked for me during the war”. Much of Kennedy’s inaugural speech was his work, and he is on record, in recently released documents, as advising Kennedy against involvement in Vietnam, advice which Kennedy concurred with but felt politically unable to follow. He also wrote about the dismal science with a wit which could actually make you laugh out loud, and an authority which would send all but the most intellectually able conservatives scurrying for cover. To live a life even one third as full as his would be a considerable achievement and pleasure.
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I read The Affluent Society and Galbraith’s short tome about the 1929 Wall Street Crash. I came across a few of his review articles in The New York Review of Books over the years too, and in the early 1970s I heard him on the BBC World Service shortwave radio debating with the late trotskyist writer, Malcolm Caldwell. (He caught out Caldwell on a couple of points of fact.) Economics is sometimes called a dismal science, often because economists are such churners out of dismal prose. J.K.Galbraith wrote well and made his subject comprehensible to the non-expert. Another economist who had that literary touch was Robert Heilbroner. Ever hear this definition of an economist: an economist is an expert who can give an expert explanation of the workings of the economy but wouldn’t know how to manage a henhouse? Now David McWilliams in the Sunday Business Post can certainly write with verve on business and economic matters. Must have poultry farming in his ancestry!
While I disagree with a great deal of his work, J.K. Galbraith hit the nail on the head when he said:
“You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.”
Mischief TJ! Galbraith was expressing his doubts about a bureaucracy being able to deliver policy- not a position against the government attempting to affect society.