John Kenneth Galbraith, 1908-2006

John Kenneth Galbraith

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith has died:

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.

Mr. Galbraith was one of the most widely read authors in the history of economics; among his 33 books was “The Affluent Society” (1958), one of those rare works that forces a nation to re-examine its values. He wrote fluidly, even on complex topics, and many of his compelling phrases — among them “the affluent society,” “conventional wisdom” and “countervailing power” — became part of the language.

An imposing presence, lanky and angular at 6 feet 8 inches tall, Mr. Galbraith was consulted frequently by national leaders, and he gave advice freely, though it may have been ignored as often as it was taken. Mr. Galbraith clearly preferred taking issue with the conventional wisdom he distrusted.

He strived to change the very texture of the national conversation about power and its nature in the modern world by explaining how the planning of giant corporations superseded market mechanisms. His sweeping ideas, which might have gained even greater traction had he developed disciples willing and able to prove them with mathematical models, came to strike some as almost quaint in today’s harsh, interconnected world where corporations devour one another.

I’ll leave it up to econbloggers to assess Mr. Galbraith’s contributions to economics. I’ll collect those here as I find them.

John Kenneth Galbraith was the first superstar economist that I can recall. I have a very vivid memory of an interview with Mr. Galbraith back in 1971 when he was George McGovern’s chief economics advisor during McGovern’s presidential campaign. I was fascinated to see Mr. Galbraith squirming, obviously mortified at having placed himself in a position in which he needed to defend positions he found absurd.

Mark Thoma at Economist’s View

James Joyner at Outside the Beltway:

Galbraith led an amazing life and had an influence on the national discussion few scholars of the 20th Century matched. That I disagree with most of his policy prescriptions or that, as noted in the Times obit, many economists criticized him for lack of mathematical rigor, hardly seems important.

Galbraith was in a class with Max Weber, Walter Lippman (a non-academic), Samuel Huntington, Marshall McLuhan, John Rawls, and a handful of others who were wide ranging thinkers who shaped our discourse at least partly as public intellectuals. As important as specialists who do their work using complicated statistical modeling are, they have little direct impact except on the handful of their colleagues and students who can understand that work. We need popularizers who synthesize the work of the specialists, especially across disciplines, and make it understandable by educated non-specialists.

Crooked Timber:

I spent several weeks earlier this year reading the Parker biography which I enjoyed (although it was surely a little prolix). He comes across as having been a surprisingly patrician character for someone who grew up in a small town in rural Canada – he enjoyed hugger-muggering with the powerful, and according to his biographer never once changed a nappy for any of his several children. But for all that, he was prepared to risk serious damage to his career in pursuit of truth, issuing, for example, a quite damning indictment of the Allied bombing of civilian targets in Japan when he was director of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey and might have been expected to toe the official line. He also showed himself entirely willing to break with political friends when he thought they were in the wrong. Whether he was a first rate economist or not (and he may very well have been; Brad DeLong for one has suggested that his contribution has been sorely under-rated), he was surely an absolutely first rate public intellectual, and genuinely witty to boot (Dan is fond of quoting his dictum that “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. “) Someone who will be missed.

Brad DeLong:

Galbraith would say, sardonically, that this national self-image is just another fraudulent piece of conventional wisdom — nurtured by the delusional, who cannot see reality, and the rich, who see it all too well but know that such delusions make them richer and more powerful. And Galbraith would be more than half right. But this self-image is also a very powerful social fact, and this more than anything else explains his waning influence on U.S. politics. It is not that the Democratic establishment has lost its nerve or been seduced by law firms and lobbyists; it is that the old Horatio Alger myth has proved extraordinarily durable.

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution:

His analytic legacy? He much overrated corporate power. But he kept alive the notion that the exercise of consumer demand and consumer sovereignty do not alone guarantee a good outcome. The market failures of the past were when consumers did not get what they want. The market failures of the future will come when consumers do get what they want. We can expect to see an intensifying arms race: suppliers will attempt to persuade people and grab their attention; the meta-rational parts of consumers will build up preemptive defenses.

Greg Mankiw:

I have long been a fan of Galbraith as a person, even though I disagree with almost all of his conclusions as an economist. Galbraith marched to his own drummer and did not feel compelled to follow the dictates of his profession. A prolific writer, he tried to reach a broad audience, rather than aiming only for the narrow club of economists. And he did it spectacularly well. I recall reading when I was an undergraduate in the 1970s that Galbraith was the economist with the highest name recognition among the general public.

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