Who is john galbraith

He was a public intellectual. He affected our public life. And it was not always easy. In the s he was accused of being a communist. Edgar Hoover did an investigation on John Kenneth Galbraith. I don't know whether you know about this investigation, but there was an investigation.

Here's what they turned up. I looked it up in Richard's book. The Hoover report came back and the target of the investigation -- that is John Kenneth Galbraith -- was found to be okay, except "conceited, egotistical, and snobbish.

In , Ken Galbraith testified before Congress in favor of wage and price controls at a time when wage and price controls might mean fighting inflation without drafting into the inflation fight those who are least able to bear that burden.

And those who are drafted first into the inflation fight as we do it now are the poor. They are the first ones to lose their jobs when we use unemployment as a vehicle to fight inflation. Well, wage and price controls, said Ken Galbraith in , might be a way to deal with this problem without putting such a burden on the poor.

Instantly, Richard Nixon denounced Ken Galbraith. He went to his staff and said do an investigation, try to smear this man. I learned this from Richard's book as well. But interestingly, three weeks later, three weeks after that, Richard Nixon announced that he was instituting wage and price controls, which prompted Ken Galbraith to say he felt like the streetwalker who had just learned that the profession was not only legal but the highest form of municipal service. Ken Galbraith brought wit to his wisdom.

And one thing he also taught us, and we will talk much more about this, is that a spoonful of sugar in the form of a little humor helps a lot of medicine go down.

It's as a writer that Ken Galbraith had made his greatest public contribution over the recent decades. What one or two books should this audience and the people watching on television read of Ken Galbraith's this month? Pick out a couple of Galbraiths. REICH: Oh, well, one that I find particularly relevant, and I hope it doesn't become relevant this month, but it was certainly relevant in the year , is actually Ken Galbraith's most popular book, a bestseller.

It's called The Great Crash. Many of you have read it. It's about what happened to this country in But, please, I can't resist. Because you have to think about what happened in the year , You hear the connection. Alone among the various forms of larceny, it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery.

This is a period incidentally when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss.

There is a net increase in psychic wealth. At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in, or more precisely not in, the country's businesses and banks. This inventory, perhaps it should be called the bezzle, varies in size and the business cycle. In good times, people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful.

But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression, all this is reversed. Audits are penetrating and meticulous, commercial morality is enormously improved, the bezzle shrinks.

So I would say, James, The Great Crash would be nominee for understanding at least the first half of this decade. Affluent Society because it's there that he introduces this idea of a social imbalance between the public and the private sectors. He has told how in the middle of the s he set out to write a book called Why People are Poor. It was meant to look at the issue of poverty in general until it became absolutely clear to him that America in the s had entered a new stage in human history, which was that we were a society in which now only a minority was poor.

And that the terms of economics in such a society were quite different from the terms that might apply to a society in which scarcity was the governing rule. His point was that now, with affluence, there was no longer a concern about scarcity for the majority, at least when it came to private goods.

That's the great passage about the mauve and cerise automobiles -- the SUVs I guess -- of the s. But he said at the same time the politics of the nation had starved the public sector with the schools and the good roads and the health care systems that worked for all. And in trying to get to that social balance lay the future of politics and economics alike. And, again, like so much of what Ken has written, it seems to me so extraordinarily pertinent to today.

One of the researches that I did for the book included looking at the amount of money that had been spent on the military in the United States, the one part of the public sector that has never really been under-funded. And it was there that Ken saw the kernel of a kind of insanity in public sector spending. That was what needed to be addressed. But I did not find a reference to this book and it may be there, and it's a little book that is as relevant today for at least part of the population as anything else that Ken Galbraith has written.

It runs about 80 pages, and every page is as relevant today. It was written, I think, in 19 … what? And in '67 the Democrats were a little bit more relevant. I can't believe I said that. What would it take for the Democratic Party to more fully embody the tradition that Galbraith stands for? REICH: Ken was famous for saying at graduation, commencement addresses the most important thing for undergraduates or graduates to do when they went out into the world was to learn the importance of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

And I think that that pretty much summarizes what a Democratic Party should stand for. Not class warfare, but simply the realization that at least right now we have the widest disparity in wealth and income and opportunity, arguably, that we've had in this country in over a hundred years. And that there is only one group that is doing astoundingly well, people in the top one percent.

They've never had as much wealth, they've never had as much income. I'm in danger of being called a class warrior, but I'm going to say it anyway. If we do not expect people who are richer than ever to pay at least something toward the possibility that everybody else can get ahead and have a good life, we cannot have a coherent society. And that's what Ken Galbraith would write if he were writing that book right now.

But before doing so, I'd like to ask you both to turn your attention a bit to another major contribution, at least in my view, of Professor Galbraith's. And I'm thinking of his consistent skepticism about the use of military force. And in a particular way what his early experience was close up of strategic bombing in World War II and what that meant to him over the decades.

Would you give us a summary of that experience of his and his positions, Richard? In the closing months of the Second World War, Ken was made a director of the Strategic Bombing Survey, a commission that had been established by the Pentagon and the White House to investigate the success of US strategic bombing of Germany and Japan.

Like so many Washington commissions, the conclusion desired was already known. The conclusion that was meant to come out of the commission was that strategic bombing had been overwhelmingly successful and that that success justified the creation of an independent United States Air Force. As many of you may remember, in the Second World War we were the only major power in which the Air Force was still part of the Army.

And the airmen wanted desperately to be free of the ground soldiers with their own Air Force. When Galbraith and his economists got to Germany and began digging through the records of the Third Reich and interviewing people like Albert Speer, they discovered that unlike the foreordained conclusion that was being sought, German military production had increased, not decreased, throughout the Second World War. At the end of the Germans were producing more fighter planes, more bombers, more tanks, more artillery, more arms that they had been in In short, the strategic bombing had not crippled the German's capacity to undertake war.

It had, in fact, encouraged them to ingeniously disperse that production and increase that capacity. And Galbraith decided, quite amazingly, that this was the truth and ought to be recorded as such. And this, of course, produced a harrowing set of weeks in which he and George Ball fought for this conclusion. It was reluctantly accepted by the people directing the survey and placed in the survey, but in a secondary section of the report.

And a Pentagon press conference was called to announce the conclusions of the report, but a week before that happened Galbraith was immediately dispatched to Tokyo to investigate the situation in Japan.

And so with Galbraith out of the country the Pentagon called the press conference, overlooked the section of the report which said strategic bombing had failed, and announced that strategic bombing had been an overwhelming success. The press dutifully reported it, and soon thereafter an independent United States Air Force was created, an Air Force that I should add has continued to practice the merits, the strategy of strategic bombing in Korea, Vietnam, the Balkans, and most recently in Iraq, in large part to no greater success than they did in the Second World War.

That is, he certainly understood the importance of the use of force strategically, but the use of force without diplomacy made absolutely no sense. When he was Ambassador to India and he saw just the beginning stirrings of United States involvement in Vietnam, he warned against it very clearly.

He wrote to the President. And, Richard, help me with this because my memory from your book is that there was some discussion with the State Department as to whether an ambassador could write to the President directly. And the Secretary of State asked that from that point on that Ken Galbraith as Ambassador to India not send any telegrams to the White House but always go through the State Department, which invited Ken Galbraith's response, a memorable response, which because I don't remember exactly the words I'm going to defer to Richard who probably does remember.

He wrote to President Kennedy that trying to communicate through the State Department was like fornicating through a mattress. There's a microphone here and a microphone there. And I'll recognize you, sir. This is about the man himself. It's a memoir called A Life in our Times. There's a laugh on every page, sometimes at his expense. And I'm just wondering what you foresee for the next 5, 10, 15 years and also what can be done to continue this legacy in these times.

I know I've read Reason, Professor Reich, and you give lots of great recommendations there. And I know, Professor Parker, you talk about not thinking so much in four-year presidential cycles but thinking in year political cycles. I'm just wondering what needs to happen on the part of concerned citizens to uphold this legacy?

REICH: Well, I would say the most important thing is for concerned citizens not to turn cynical but to get more involved than ever. In the wake of the past two elections, I come across a lot of people who say, look, I tried so hard, I've never worked so hard in my entire life, and I'm just sick of it and I'm afraid nothing is going to work. And that kind of attitude it seems to me is the most dangerous, because that seeds the grounds and concedes democracy to the other side.

And, frankly, I don't think the other side is all that much interested in the kind of democracy we have right now. I am, frankly, worried that, for example, the wall between church and state is being systematically dismantled, or could be. People have got to get involved. There's no substitute for direct involvement. Politics is not something to hold your nose over.

Politics is the applied form of democracy. And I say that to everybody in this room, most of whom have been involved before. But you've got to stay involved. But it's more than sending money. And I think that a lot of people confuse donating money with actually being politically active. One of the great casualties of our time is that people can so easily feel that they are fulfilling their social conscience by just writing a check.

It takes more than that. It takes actually the hard work of grassroots politics. And it also takes people in states like this, blue states, calling up friends and relatives in so-called red states and talking to them respectfully but entering into a dialogue with them.

We're not talking enough with each other in this country about what's important. One of the most interesting things about the book tour that I'm currently on is the number of rightwing talk shows that have been interested in talking to me about Galbraith. They're not, obviously, putting me on in order to spread the Galbraithian message, but they want to engage the Galbraithian message because they find contemporary liberal politics to be so anemic.

What they find attractive about Ken Galbraith is that he was a vertebrate liberal. And I think we need to get back to encouraging vertebrate liberalism. And by that, I would suggest to you that a lot of these interviewers start by asking about whether or not Galbraithian liberalism has gone out of date and, after all, aren't we in a new period of fiscal responsibility and limited government.

And it is impossible to allow those Republican frames of argument to stand. Under George W. Kennedy, larger than under Harry Truman, and larger than under Franklin Roosevelt during the Depression. What is this Republican Party of limited government? REICH: At the risk of just overstating that point, it's very important that followers of Ken Galbraith's books and philosophy, Ken Galbraith who argued for a Keynesianism that was a responsible Keynesianism that called for public spending on schools and on health care and on parks and environment.

Understand that we have since the early s embarked on another very different Keynesian experiment. We might call it military Keynesianism. This is something that in the Cold War we didn't do very much until , and that military Keynesianism has, to some extent, in a very limited way, kept the economy going but it has not helped much of the public lead better lives. And he describes his role in what he calls America's economic imperialism that rather than invading countries and taking them over by force — like Iraq, I guess -- that we were subjugating them.

And he describes his personal role in that by economic means, by giving them so much money and lending that they can never repay and, therefore, we own them.

So it's been a kind of way of taking over countries by subjecting them to unreasonable debt. What did John Galbraith, what were his thoughts on our role economically in the world in that way? In fact, he began in the early s to teach the very first course that Harvard ever offered on international development. He extended his practical knowledge in the s through his work in India and then, of course, continued on as Indian Ambassador in the s. You'll find Galbraith as early as the late s emphasizing the role of education, particularly the role of the education of women, the central need to provide for sufficient domestic production of agricultural goods so that poor populations are not subject to the whims of global agricultural markets.

And, finally, encouraging domestic development of industrial and urban sectors rather than relying on the importation of vast amounts of first world capital in order to follow a Western development model. So I think Galbraith has been quite consistent on this. You can find him in the '80s and '90s consistently criticizing the behavior of the World Bank and the IMF under strategic adjustment terms.

The record there is spotless. REICH: One of the best books coming out of the Indian experience for Ken Galbraith is called The Culture of Mass Poverty, which I think opened a lot of people's eyes to not only have the international economy, the international trade, international direct investment may inadvertently maintain mass poverty, but also what many countries need to do for themselves.

I think one of the keys to understanding this man's power is to see his national and international reach in the context of a profound commitment to a locality, to this place, actually, to Boston, Cambridge. This is, of course, symbolized powerfully not only by his major and adult lifelong commitment to Harvard University and its community, even as he was marginal to the tradition of academic appointment, his powerful commitment to the Kennedy political tradition that is so alive in this state, his faithful support of Senator Kennedy.

But, also, how many books did Ken publish? There are 42 published by Houghton Mifflin, but there are half a dozen more. Now, you have to remember those sold eight million copies, and he didn't write his first book on his own until he was So for those of you still thinking about becoming a writer, good luck. I'm sure that John Kenneth Galbraith understood the power of that Boston tradition. This is the week in which The Atlantic Monthly announced its move to Washington.

Professor Galbraith, a major contributor over the decades to The Atlantic Monthly. This Boston tradition was precious to him, is precious to him. And it's important to claim him as someone whose greatness is in part because of the great soil that he sank his roots so deeply in.

Yes, sir? In Dostoyevsky's novel Brothers Karamazov, two characters engaged in conversation, and one told the other it is always very useful to hear intelligent men. We have to quote Dostoyevsky's character today in listening to you gentlemen.

It is very useful to listen to intelligent men. Unfortunately, as many of us who know, our government now is a much worse situation than it ever was since America began. They wanted it. They told us that. Tonight you have to listen to that at They said no to that. Churchill did not want anything to do with Hitler. At the end of the war, Hitler was dead but 50 million human beings died.

Nowadays …. I appreciate very much your invoking this important piece of history that Professor Galbraith was present for. Would you conclude with a comment or a question and then I'll ask …. If you did not intervene, it would be shorter. Incidentally, I like very much what you write but today's remark does not ….

We told him we have nothing to do with that and then when he entered, again we invaded Iraq and the whole hell broke out. Now, in connection with that, this is my question. All three of you, if you don't mind answering, what is better for the world, peace at any price or victory at any price?

Was that the question? PARKER: I think particularly sitting here at the Kennedy Library, because I sat upstairs in the research library of this building for so many weeks and so many months and was so touched to handle documents from the Kennedy Administration. As you probably know, besides Ted Sorensen and the President himself, Professor Galbraith was one of those asked by the President to prepare a draft for that inaugural. And the line that I most remember from Ken's draft that survives in that inaugural of John F.

Kennedy is, "We must never negotiate out of fear, but we must never fear to negotiate. What this country has got to learn is how to strike a balance between the export of fear and its willingness to negotiate as much with its allies as with its enemies. That's how I would answer your question. How did the Bush gang get in? I can't imagine that Professor Galbraith with his astute wit did not comment on this to some of you, particularly you, Mr. And the more we understand about how they did that, I mean a lot of people feel that this is the beginnings of a fascist takeover.

And there's a lot of resemblance to what went on in Germany in the '30s, I guess. You know, maybe that's stretching it a little, but I'm not so sure. Did Professor Galbraith say anything about this, express any of his own thinking about this to you? An activist liberal, Galbraith was personal adviser to every Democratic candidate for the US presidency from F. Roosevelt to L. He was active in Americans for Democratic Action, a group of eminent liberal intellectuals, particularly during its opposition to the Vietnam War.

Galbraith's contribution to social science is an alternative to the established, neoclassical concept of capitalism. Caves and R. Holton on Canadian Economy: Prospect and Retrospect The Scotch , Galbraith's entertaining account of his boyhood environment in southern Ontario, was published in His liberal interventionist theories became displaced in the s when conservative fundamentalism became an attractive alternative. A Journey Through Economic Time and The Culture of Contentment were Galbraith's rebuttals to conservative economic policy and their failure to revive Western economies from recessionary trends and succeeded in bringing many of his theories back into vogue.

In The Socially Concerned Today U of T Press Galbraith recorded his views on what the socially concerned society should be today, and reflected on the principles of distribution of wealth, flaws in the market system and the state of higher education.

A central concept of the book is the revised sequence. The conventional wisdom in economic thought portrays economic life as a set of competitive markets governed ultimately by the decisions of sovereign consumers. In this original sequence, the control of the production process flows from consumers of commodities to the organizations that produce those commodities. In the revised sequence, this flow is reversed and businesses exercise control over consumers by advertising and related salesmanship activities.

The revised sequence concept applies only to the industrial system—that is, the manufacturing core of the economy in which each industry contains only a handful of very powerful corporations. It does not apply to the market system in the Galbraithian dual economy.

In the market system, comprised of the vast majority of business organizations, price competition remains the dominant form of social control. In the industrial system, however, comprised of the 1, or so largest corporations, competitive price theory obscures the relation to the price system of these large and powerful corporations.

In Galbraith's view, the principal function of market relations in this industrial system is not to constrain the power of the corporate behemoths but to serve as an instrument for the implementation of their power. Moreover, the power of these corporations extends into commercial culture and politics, allowing them to exercise considerable influence upon popular social attitudes and value judgments.

That this power is exercised in the shortsighted interest of expanding commodity production and the status of the few is both inconsistent with democracy and a barrier to achieving the quality of life which the new industrial state with its affluence could provide. The New Industrial State not only provided Galbraith with another best-selling book, it also extended once again the currency of Institutionalist economic thought. The book also filled a very pressing need in the late s.

The conventional theory of monopoly power in economic life maintains that the monopolist will attempt to restrict supply in order to maintain price above its competitive level. The social cost of this monopoly power is a decrease in both allocative efficiency and the equity of income distribution. This conventional economic analysis of the role of monopoly power did not adequately address popular concern about the large corporation in the late s.

The growing concern focused on the role of the corporation in politics, the damage done to the natural environment by an unmitigated commitment to economic growth, and the perversion of advertising and other pecuniary aspects of culture. The New Industrial State gave a plausible explanation of the power structure involved in generating these problems and thus found a very receptive audience among the rising American counterculture and political activists.

Economics and the Public Purpose, the last work in Galbraith's major trilogy, continued the characteristic insistence on the role of power in economic life and the inability of conventional economic thought to deal adequately with this power. Conventional economic thought, with its competitive model and presumptions of scarcity and consumer sovereignty—what Galbraith called the "imagery of choice"—serves to hide the power structure that actually governs the American economy.

This obscurantism prevents economists from coming to grips with this governing structure and its untoward effects on the quality of life. Galbraith employed what he called "the test of anxiety" in this attack on conventional economics. He argued that any system of economic ideas should be evaluated by the test of anxiety—that is, by its ability to relate to popular concern about the economic system and to resolve or allay this anxiety. Galbraith contended that conventional economic thought failed the test of anxiety and again offered his basic model from The New Industrial State as an alternative approach to understanding the contemporary economy.

After the years he served in both the American and Canadian governments, Galbraith returned to scholarly activity, extensive travel, and writing, using Harvard University as his home base.