April 30, 2006
THE ANTI-JACOBS:
Liberal thinker JK Galbraith dies (BBC, 4/30/06)
Renowned economist and liberal thinker John Kenneth Galbraith has died in the US at the age of 97.He died on Saturday of natural causes in hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his son Alan said.
The Canadian-born Harvard professor wrote over 30 books on socio-economic issues, the most famous of which was The Affluent Society in 1958.
He moved in political circles, advising Democratic presidents and serving as John F Kennedy's envoy to India.
Consider that when a mystified Richard Hofstadter wrote about American anti-intellectualism in the early 60s, Mr. Galbraith was the public intellectual par excellence. If you wanted to capture his philosophy in a couple lines you could do worse than this:
The lesson of the whole post-Keynesian world is that governments are now responsible for economic performance. Any notion that poor performance can't be remedied by the state is a reversion to 19th-century attitudes, which I'm not prepared to accept.
The result was that he did as much as anyone to give us the nightmare of the 70s and the twenty five years since we elected Ronald Reaghan have largely been an effort to undo the damage Mr. Galbraith helped cause.
MORE:
John Kenneth Galbraith, 97, Dies; Economist Held a Mirror to Society (HOLCOMB B. NOBLE and DOUGLAS MARTIN, 4/30/06, NY Times)
John Kenneth Galbraith, the iconoclastic economist, teacher and diplomat and an unapologetically liberal member of the political and academic establishment that he needled in prolific writings for more than half a century, died yesterday at a hospital in Cambridge, Mass. He was 97.
Life holds no more bitter irony than to be an iconoclast who discovers late in life that the icons were right. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 30, 2006 9:38 AM
You can take an economist out of Canada, but you can't take Canada out of an economist, even if he followed the money to Cambridge. But then MA is just an extension of Ontario anyway, so maybe he never really left.
Writer Joe Queenan once said sitting through a retrospective of all movies with Canadian Dan Ackroyd was a particular kind of Hell. One might say the same thing of Galbraith's books.
Posted by: Ed Bush at April 30, 2006 10:28 AMIs there any evidence that Galbraith actually did realize that he was wrong and the "icons" were right?
Posted by: Jim in Chicago at April 30, 2006 11:20 AMGalbraith made some sense in The Nature of Mass Poverty. He didn't let happen often.
Posted by: Joseph Hertzlinger at April 30, 2006 5:36 PMJim in Chicago:
He made some comments late in life about the failure of the socialistic economic model, after the Berlin Wall fell and it was thoroughly obvious to most observers -- even tenured professors -- that you might as well sell the entire Soviet economy for $3.95 at a yard sale and throw in a free Jello mold.
He also recently told William F. Buckley not to vote for Bush because virtually no Harvard professors support him. I kid you not. He said that to Buckley.
Posted by: Matt Murphy at April 30, 2006 10:25 PM