Who's on next? John Kenneth Galbraith is still on the job, after forty years as America's most urbane socialist

National Review, August 26, 1991 by Alan Reynolds

FORTY YEARS have rushed by since John Kenneth Galbraith wrote the first of his two dozen books. For many of those years, Galbraith dominated the market for popularized economics, when he wasn't serving as Ambassador to India, or writing speeches for Adlai Stevenson, Lyndon Johnson, and all three Kennedys.

His message appears to have solidified early. Galbraith claimed the U.S. economy was dominated by a handful of giant firms that could raise prices at will, such as (believe it or not) U.S. Steel, Burroughs, Chrysler, and Zenith. Thanks to advertising, producers can persuade us to buy anything at any price. Galbraith always thought it foolish to apply antitrust to these powerful "oligopolies" (which it is, because they aren't oligopolies), so we supposedly need the countervailing power of a big government, armed with wage and price controls and other regulations.

If this quaint vision ever bore any relationship to reality, it certainly does not today. The modern economy is vigorously competitive, worldwide. But an accurate picture of the economy was never the point of Galbraith or his successors. The objective was instead to spin arguments in support of big government, which is regarded as inherently delightful.

Galbraith never objected to being called a socialist, as he is in Europe, since he believes "a certain number of industries should be publicly owned." In the United States, though, the press labelled him a "liberal." Indeed, even now, he is more or less a definition of the term "liberal" on economic issues. The current fad of moaning about inadequate government "infrastructure" (highways are good, cars are bad) is entirely Galbraithian.

The identification of Galbraith with liberal orthodoxy is ironic, since the conformist impulses of liberals were the prime target of his famous attack on "conventional wisdom": "The liberal brings moral fervor and passion, even a sense of righteousness, to the ideas with which he is most familiar.... No one has seriously accused the Democratic Party of having a new or dangerous thought for 15 years."

Galbraith nonetheless had to learn to adapt his patrician views to those his liberal friends would find comfortably familiar. The first edition of The Affluent Society described poverty as an "afterthought" due to such things as "inability to adapt to the discipline of modern life, excessive procreation, [and] alcohol." There's no point just giving the poor more money, because "to spend income requires a minimum of character and intelligence even as to produce it." There is a large measure of common sense in those comments, most of which were purged from the second edition.

Filling Galbraith's Shoes

GALBRAITH is still a force to be reckoned with. His 1987 book, Economics in Perspective, is arguably his most mature, scholarly work. Galbraith's sarcastic wit still shines: "There are a significant number of learned men and women who hold that any successful effort to make ideas lively, intelligible, and interesting is a manifestation of deficient scholarship. This is the fortress behind which the minimally coherent regularly find refuge."

After forty years, though, Galbraith is surely willing to let some younger protege take over the increasingly thankless task of popularizing leftist polemics. But who could possibly fill these giant shoes? Robert Lekachman was probably the only other true member of the Galbraithian school, and he is no longer with us. E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post recently identified two candidates--Robert Reich of MIT and Robert Kuttner of The New Republic. "Wanniski, Gilder, and their allies were there when the country was looking for new ideas," says Dionne. Reich and Kuttner apparently hope the country is now looking for old ideas. They have repackaged Galbraith, without the wit, and added some pandering to special interests in the form of subsidies to corporations that finance Democratic politicians, and, in Kuttner's case, protectionism.

Galbraith's own choices for a successor, revealed in Economics in Perspective as well as publicity blurbs on the putative successors' books, lean much further left. He writes coolly of the "more orthodox but able, diligent, and prolific Lester Thurow." Fainter praise goes to Bob Kuttner, for "good clear writing" in "economic journalism." To my knowledge, Galbraith has never had a kind word for Robert Reich. His taste turns toward an obscure group of radical economists who cling desperately to the shredded remnants of Marxism.

Galbraith appears particularly fond of Samuel bowles (son of the late Ambassador Chester Bowles), who recently edited a collection of essays in his honor. An earlier book, Beyond the Waste Land, which Bowles wrote in 1984 with David Gordon and Thomas Weisskopf, carries high praise from Galbraith, who calls them "the three most interesting economists of the Left." Bowles and company propose that, "Whenever the actual unemployment rate exceeded 2 per cent in a local area, the Federal Government should make funds available to local governments to finance guaranteed public employment for anyone who needs and is able to work." Each of these jobs is to pay either "prevailing union wages" or enough to support a family of three (presumably even single people get enough for three). Where would the government get the money to meet this huge payroll? From taxing, borrowing, or printing money. But any of those options destroys at least as many private jobs as the make-work schemes "create."