Between Friend: Perspectives on John Kenneth Galbraith

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Summary: Sharing a point of view
Review: This is a birthday tribute book, in which a famous author, Harvard professor, economist, former Ambassador to India, and incredible wit is praised in print by people who find themselves honored by the opportunity to detail their links with John Kenneth Galbraith. Many names are scattered throughout the book, which has no index for finding them again. All my life I have wanted to be smart enough to be as witty as JKG, and in the present economic situation, it is a great comfort to find evidence that so many people share that aspiration. Freud is mentioned as a possible source of "a similar remark about individual people in psychoanalysis" needed for a comparison on page 126 with a comment of Karl Marx in CONTRIBUTION TO THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, originally published in 1859, "Mankind inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve." Conversations between these people can be daunting when it seems to lack any point whatever, and JKG has the kind of courage that it takes not to worry when an interest in political economy puts someone in a spot which requires responses at a level which most people have trouble maintaining at their best, responding to cues about basic conditions that establish who they are in ways that the inquisitive JKG could notice, when it was missing in those who had formerly been powerful, as when he met ex-Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas Home and told Roy Jenkins, "Who was that man? I thought he was Alec Home." (p. 50).

Power is a major consideration in this book, as a factor that was not adequately considered in the mainstream economic theory of motives which were thought classically to drive supply and demand. JKG noticed that the affluent society's maximization of production produced an increased need for public goods like trash collection and police to protect people from being swindled. The friendly tributes at the beginning of the book frequently note how tall and witty JKG was, and pages 161-175 at the end provide examples from books that JKG wrote of his thoughts on Farming, The Scotch, Rules of Academic Life, Economics and Economists, Writing, Politics, Politicians, Family, Places, and The Wisdom of Age. My favorite choice of words, "or a drunken bat," (p. 171) occurs in the section on Politics, and seems less hyperbolically suggestive of the fears that the Scotch possessed and the way everyone felt in 1968 than the kind of comparison which JKG used to describe a government crisis, in addition to "or a drunken bat."

I have not been doing Harvard many favors in recent thoughts which associate it most frequently with the Unabomber, Daniel Ellsberg, or Henry the K., who was repudiated when he might have wished to retain the kind of association with Harvard that JKG maintained for 50 years. Galbraith was a key adviser to JFK, and his book LETTERS TO KENNEDY still makes interesting reading, but JKG did not stay on for the debacle produced by President Johnson, and many in this book considered JKG a leader of the effort to oppose the Vietnam war. Political party was not an overriding consideration for JKG, certainly not in 1981 when he wrote the description of Johnson which is included in this book, that might be applied to Woodrow Wilson or any number of American presidents.

"Johnson sought to compensate for his uncertainty in foreign policy with an outward display of firmness, strength, decisiveness. This made him open to the advice of those who urged the seemingly strong as distinct from the restrained and considered course. Perhaps also his instinct was for an assertively masculine pose, as others have suggested. Combined, these qualities put him at the mercy of those who took pride not in their knowledge but in their will to act. Thus the disaster in Southeast Asia." (p. 173).

Seriously, though, there is a section on Economics in this book and an attempt throughout to present phrases which JKG ought to get credit for adding to the vocabulary of political economy. On the birthday question, if you hurry, you should be able to obtain and read this book prior to October 15, 2003, when John Kenneth Galbraith will be 95 and coincidentally, Friedrich Nietzsche will be 159, though Nietzsche has been dead more than a hundred years. This book starts with, "Thorstein Veblen" (pp. xii, 26, 30-31, 35, 36), "he could see little difference between a communist jungle and a capitalist one." (p. 9). "Galbraith's complaints against atmospheric nuclear testing" (p. 10), "endless meetings and far too many people." (p. 11). "I came to oppose strongly the widely applauded Reagan-Bush policy of reaching out to Saddam Hussein" (Peter Galbraith, appointed United States Ambassador to Croatia in 1993, worked extensively on Iraq in the late 1980s, p. 13). "During World War II, in the very opposite of the Keynesian stereotype, Galbraith and a few others in the Office of Price Administration actually produced a decline in prices during wartime. . . . Inflation dropped from 9.7 percent in 1941 to 2.1 percent in 1944." (p. 18). "his ability to distinguish carefully between real motives and pretense" (p. 23), "sought-after public speaker" (p. 24) "an extremely fluent writer, a quality that journalistic exigencies had fostered in him. From that time onward, I think, he always believed that he had to write something every day." (p. 24). "even truer today than it was then, although today the outstanding gap is that between private affluence and public poverty." (p. 26). "American farmers, today about 1 percent of the population, produce more than they did as 25 percent of the population in 1930." (p. 32). "American Academy of Arts and Letters; from 1984 to 1987 he served as its president." (p. 34). "countervailing power" (p. 37) "he vividly contrasted the `social imbalance' between the opulence of private consumption and the starvation of public services." (p. 37).