Biographies: The Economists: John Kenneth Galbraith (1908- ).

Biographies: The Economists: John Kenneth Galbraith (1908- ).


John Kenneth Galbraith(1908- )
John Kenneth Galbraith:
Affluent Society:
The New Industrial State:
Galbraithian Philosophy:
Conclusions:
Notes: [TOC] John Kenneth Galbraith
John Kenneth Galbraith was born in Ontario. His first degree was earned in his home province, and, then, turning to the United States to continue with his studies, he was to eventually receive a Ph.D. in 1934 from the University of California. Galbraith was to teach at both California and Princeton before joining the faculty at Harvard in 1948.
During WWII he was in charge of wartime price control. It is interesting to note that "Galbraith's attitude towards price and wage control is not really central to his position."2
During the Kennedy years he was an ambassador to India.
Galbraith's works include: The Great Crash (1955), The Affluent Society (1958), The Liberal Hour (1960), Made to Last (1964), and The New Industrial State (1967).
[TOC] Affluent Society
Galbraith's first big seller was his Affluent Society (1958). It most likely contributed (and likely to a significant degree) to the "war on poverty," being a disastrous government spending policy first brought on by Kennedy and Johnson. This policy (both in the United States and in Canada) not only brought on ruinous levels of debt but split the country in to those who have the jobs and those who do not. "The war on poverty of which so much has been made since then has been able to make excellent careers and many thousands of civil servants of academic people who have been able to do study after study on poverty."3
As for the book:

"The main content of the book was not really affluence of society. Rather it was devoted to other themes: to denigrating the tastes of ordinary people, the tastes of those who prefer pushpin to poetry, who prefer large tailfins to nice, compact, expensive little cars. It was directed to developing the advantages of extending the power of government. A major theme was the alleged contrast between private affluence and public squalor."4 Professor Rothbard in his criticisms of the Affluent Society: It is "replete with fallacies ... dogmatic assertions and time-honoured rhetorical devices in place of reasoned argument."5
[TOC] The New Industrial State
Galbraith's book, The New Industrial State, was published in 1967. Milton Friedman thinks that this work is one were Galbraith attempts to update certain of the theories espoused by Veblen.
Galbraith thought, as so many did in the 1970s, that everything was run by five or six hundred companies, and the "technostructure."
"... technical change is the product of the matchless ingenuity of the small man forced by competition to employ his wits to better his neighbour. Unhappily, it is a fiction. Technical development has long since become the preserve of the scientist and the engineer." (Galbraith.) A British economic authority of long standing, Professor John Jewkes, in his review of The New Industrial State, concluded that the facts on which Galbraith based his arguments were incorrect. Jewkes was of the view that Galbraith "merely repeats his unfounded assertions and dogmatically dismisses anyone who presumes to differ from him ..."6 In Friedman on Galbraith there is a reference to Sir Frank S. McFadzean; it was McFadzean's view that Galbraith displayed a "remarkable naivety as to how a business really operates ... [these monopolistic] events and markets ... exist only ... in the imagination of Professor Galbraith. ... a leap [not to] be justified by any objective analysis." G. C. Allen, a professor of Political Economy at University College, London ('47-'67) questions not only Galbraith's "facts" but also his methods. Allen did not think it quite proper for a "conversationalist" to give an "idiosyncratic interpretation of orthodox doctrine in order to give force to his own arguments." And while his lectures were full of interest and fire, Galbraith misled people.
"... he [Galbraith] put forward as if they were novel and heretical various propositions about industrial society which have been accepted as commonplaces by many economists for several decades. ... The notion that the economic history of modern times shows a steady progression from highly competitive markets to monopoly is remote from the truth. The industrial system is much more complicated and intricate than it appears in his version of it. And the solution of the problems created by economic growth and advanced technology cannot be found within the confines of his own ideology."7 [TOC] Galbraithian Philosophy
Galbraith, to Friedman8, was a 20th-century version of the early 19th-century Tory Radical of Great Britain. Galbraith believed in the superiority of aristocracy and in its paternalistic authority. These sorts of people -- and they are all too common these days -- deny that the free market should rule, deny that consumers should be allowed choice; and assert that all should be determined by those with "higher minds." As Friedman says:
"Many reformers -- Galbraith is not alone in this -- have as their basic objection to a free market that it frustrates them in achieving their reforms, because it enables people to have what they want, not what the reformers want. Hence every reformer has a strong tendency to be adverse to a free market."9 Like John Stuart Mill; Galbraith treated "his assertions as if they have scientific authority, as if they have been demonstrated, when they have not been at all."10
[TOC] Conclusions
John Kenneth Galbraith was a pop star, "fundamentally a one man crusade";11 his "theories have never found any acceptance in the academic world --" He promoted the collectivist religion which believed that coercive government action against the individual would be in the best interests of the collective whole, of society. It is a false religion which has a perverse view of the nature of man (to Galbraith and his ilk, men are but like whining sheep). Man is an evolved creature which must, by natural law, proceed to serve his and his own family's best interests. As recent history will readily illustrate, it is when individuals serve their own bests interests that the public interests, in so doing, are also best served. Central control by the elite not only wastes precious resources, but splits society into those who have and those who do not. Only in a free market will people be able to lead independently sovereign lives; and only in a free market will people be able to be productive - helping themselves, their families, and their community as a whole. The market is simply another word for freedom. For the maximum good for the most people, we are obliged to proceed on this basis: "Liberty of each, limited by the like liberties of all, is the rule in conformity with which society must be organized."12
_______________________________[UP]NOTES:
1 Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) was one of Galbraith's teachers. [See Friedman on Galbraith and on Curing the British Disease (Vancouver: The Fraser Institute, 1977), p. 24.]
2 Friedman on Galbraith, op. cit., p. 33.
3 Friedman on Galbraith, op. cit., p. 13.
4 Friedman on Galbraith, op. cit., p. 14.
5 See Friedman on Galbraith, op. cit., at p. 64, in quoting from Rothbard's work; Man, Economy and State. This is Murray N. Rothbard, who received his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University; studied at New York University under Ludwig von Mises for 10 years; taught at U. of Nevada; and was a lecturer and a senior fellow of the Cato Institute.
6 For the Galbraith and Jewkes quotes, see Friedman on Galbraith, op. cit., p. 18.
7 Professor G. C. Allen, Friedman on Galbraith, op. cit., pp. 22-3.
8 Friedman on Galbraith, op. cit.
9 Friedman on Galbraith, op. cit., p. 32.
10 Maurice Cowling's book, Mill and Liberalism, as quoted in Friedman on Galbraith, op. cit.
11 Friedman on Galbraith, op. cit., p. 36.
12 Herbert Spencer.