Reflections on Galbraith, Political Economist

One of the most profound eulogies on the passing of John Kenneth Galbraith is written by his biographer, Richard Parker:

The Galbraith I knew -- and wrote about in my biography, "John Kenneth Galbraith: His, Life, His Politics, His Economics" -- was a man driven by a few guiding ideas. He thought power was the governing force in all societies, and the issue that needed to be studied most closely by all the modern social sciences. And he believed that universities had balkanized the search for answers by settling for departmental borders...

He argued with professional colleagues because he thought the trend to mathematicize economics led too easily to obscurantism and irrelevance. Economies weren't governed by "natural laws," like gravity or the speed of light in nature itself, but by social conventions, habits, customs, laws and fears. Human beings weren't thus "rational maximizers of their self-interest" but as often frail as they were strong, and highly susceptible to the influence of leaders of all kinds, simply because as Aristotle had long ago noted, humans were zoon politikon, social beings.

Amen.

I'm wryly reminded of why it seems so many look on his passing as a ho-hum event with this gem, provided by EconLog:

LBJ threw away one of his drafts for a speech with the remark: ‘Did y’ever think, Ken, that making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg? It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else’

Folks say that they don't like "politics" -- but politics is simply human beings deciding on social rules. The struggle is always one of power -- and our founding fathers recognized this. For example, James Madison writes to Thomas Jefferson:

Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Government, the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of Constituents.

And in his first inaugural address, Jefferson said:

Bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

Critics, Supporters
Galbraith has been dismissed by fellow economists for promoting no new theories, the holy-academic grail. And his criticism of how markets work (contrasted with how academics often write/model them) earned him no friends in the conservative movement, as this article from Reason attests.

One self-proclaimed (and libertarian-leaning) Curmudgeon:

History has demonstrated that John Kenneth Galbraith was wrong about just about everything... Your Curmudgeon knows nothing about Galbraith apart from his economic thinking, which was Keynesian: i.e., social-welfare fascist... When a man given great influence in councils of State is as consistently and dramatically wrong as Galbraith was, surely it's cause for some reflection, if only on how reliably good intentions have led good men to do bad things.

Interesting Galbraith quotes from the blogosphere:

• David Frazer: "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" and "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."
  
  
• Der Auslander: "Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong."

Today's Relevance
MaxSpeak writes:

JKG reflected the ... view from the 1930s of capitalism, that it was dominated by monopolistic or oligopolistic large corporations who administered prices that were not competitive.

And yet today, our economy has an even more profoundly oligopolistic structure.

Take media, for example. Mass media help shape society (from their role as gatekeepers to their role as image shapers and means of delivering ever-more advertising messages). And 95 percent of what we see, hear and read is controlled by five multinational corporations. Five.

That's market concentration. And I doubt you read about it in mainstream obits. Certainly, there are no reflections on current market structure in this comprehensive obit from the NY Times.

Instead, it takes the foreign press (and financial press, at that) to make the connection with today's economy and political environment. From the Financial Times:

[H]e was both somewhat less and much more than a professional economist: he was an institution of postwar US life...

Indeed, many of the dangers of untrammelled markets he had described in the 1950s and 1960s, not least the coexistence of "private opulence and public squalor", seem rather more obvious in George W. Bush’s America than they had been in Eisenhower’s or Kennedy’s. The return of an income distribution that looks increasingly similar to that of a century ago must make his work increasingly relevant.

I shall close with this lament, also from the, Financial Times. Galbraith wrote these words in 1987:

Economics is not a science [but] continuing interpretation of current circumstances. All its useful propositions can be stated in clear, unembellished and generally agreeable English.

Sadly, the study of both economics and politics have strayed far from their philosophical roots ... from a human-centered examination of the world to a machine-centered examination resting shakily on multivariate statistical analysis. Both economics and politics are entertwined fields of study, or should be, because at their core they reflect society, how power is distributed and its impact on how people live.