Professor John Kenneth Galbraith Passes

Professor John Kenneth Galbraith was 97 when he died this week-end. As an economist, he was not the ground-breaking type. The ideas expounded in his brilliant book The Affluent Society had first belonged to Thorstein Veblen and others. What made him important was his ability to explain what was important in economics to decision-makers who needed it explained to them.

Born in Canada, America’s future ambassador to India become a US citizen in 1939 and spent part the war at the Office of Price Administration because he was too tall (at 6 feet 8 inches) for the military, and some as director of the US Strategic Bombing Survey, which tried to determine the economic effects of Allied bombing on Germany. After the War, he became Professor of Economics at Harvard. There, he taught a young fellow named John F. Kennedy. He influenced an entire generation of economic students and teachers as well as policy-makers.

What he understood better than most is the idea that money and wealth are not ends but means. A wealthy society has the resources to improve the quality of life for its members. This predisposed him to government spending, which many felt made him a socialist. He was under no such illusions; he once wrote, “socialism existed in superbly attractive form in oratory, in literature and in belief, but it was not a viable design.” All the same, the Times [London] obituary for his read, “In his last major work, The Great Society (1997), Galbraith gave his definition of the perfect political system. The rich accepted high rates of taxation, immigrants were welcomed and education was seen as important as an end in itself. Happiness, he said, did not require an expanding economy.”

Although his ideas passed from fashion thanks to the Reagan-Thatcher counter-revolution, he remained an active intellectual to his last days. The man had 40 books to his credit, any one of which would make a fine capstone to a lesser man’s career. Of the Vietnam war he said, “we cannot win, and one we should not wish to win,” and in his last years, he said much the same of the Bushevik’s war in Iraq.

Oddly, one expects that he will be remembered because of his talent as a writer more than anything else. It was he who coined the term “conventional wisdom” in The Affluent Society, and he said, “I put my manuscripts through the typewriter three times — first for sense, second for style, and third for both.” That is what HL Mencken meant when he said, “Good writing is clear thinking made visible.” The late professor made a lot of clear thinking visible.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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