13 January 2015
It has been nearly sixty years since John Kenneth Galbraith, the famed public intellectual, Harvard economist, diplomat, and author penned The Affluent Society. His most influential book, it was an expression of the man behind it and a distillation of the world and of the times in which he lived. Molded by the experiences of the Great Depression and World War II, Galbraith was a passionate and unapologetic liberal, a restless and prolific defender of its basic values: liberty, equality, and freedom. As a liberal, he was one of the last in the tradition of political economy inaugurated by Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, a way of thinking about the world which did not prize itself on the mathematical formalism so characteristic of contemporary economics, but focused instead on the complex interactions of firms, the market, and the state. Today there are few prominent political economists, and none as prominent or as sharp as Galbraith. Political economists like Robert Heilbroner and Robert Reich fall into the tradition after Galbraith, and they owe their debt to him. Living and writing in the period in which the obsession mathematical formalism came to prominence in professional economics, Galbraith stood for a tradition which sought explanations not in numbers alone, but in the complex interactions of economic actors, institutions, society, and nature. It found evidence not in the mist-enveloped regions of mathematical theory, but in the unaccommodating circumstances of concrete history. Against the narrow, insular, and reductionist tendencies of professional economics, Galbraith’s political economy stood for a manner of thinking which remained holistic and practical. It abandoned the conceit that economic life is an autonomous phenomenon, and saw it instead as inextricably bound up with the greater life of society, not least with politics. As a political economist, Galbraith, like Keynes before him and Reich after him, had an eye for aggregates, for sifting through and sorting through the manifold factors and trends and patterns of economic life to find a few basic principles which could describe its general motion, for penetrating through a maddening sea of variables to see the laws which govern them. Like a true scientist, he had an uncanny ability to sit with huge magnitudes of complex and unintelligible data, and distill from them a few key aggregates. These aptitudes and tendencies may have had something to do with the fact that Galbraith was, above all, a practical political economist. He had to be. Like Reich, who was the Secretary of Labour in the Clinton administration, Galbraith, as a public official in the Roosevelt and Kennedy administrations, did not have the dual luxuries of error and irrelevance enjoyed by other economists. It was practical necessity which informed Galbraith’s work and dictated his thinking. It was practical necessity which lent it its distinctively historicist character. As a practical political economist, Galbraith’s work was not only an expression of the direct historical circumstances in which he lived, but also a response to the unique problems which it posed. Continue reading →