April 30, 2006
The world has lost an enormously important voice for humanism and all that is good and just in economic thought with the passing at age 97 of the Canadian born economist who rose to political and economic stardom with his long career in the United States as Professor of economics at Harvard, advisor to American presidents from the Democratic party from Franklin Roosevelt forward,onetime Ambassador to India under President John F. Kennedy, leading liberal intellectual and prolific writer of popular and accessible works in economics, public policy and political economy.
Galbraith who was a product of a very different era received his intellectual inspiration from the work of theorists, thinkers and iconoclasts like Thorstein Veblen,John Commons, Richard Ely, Wesley Mitchell,Aldoph Berle and Gardiner Means, John Maynard Keynes and the school of evolutionary and institutional economics that was influential during the 1920s and 1930s in North American economic thought.
He also had a largely unrecognized(possibly even by himself) Canadian approach to economic analysis and thought that was rooted in the interdisciplinary tradition of political economy that people like Harold Innis developed at the University of Toronto during the period of the 1930s and forties.
Galbraith correctly saw that economics was about power and the disproportionate role that corporate power could deliver to the wealthy few who controlled the corporations unless there was a countervailing force to balance that power and ensure that social justice was promoted and the common good protected and nurtured.This was an idea he introduced in American Capitalism published in 1952 which also displayed his formidable grasp of Keynes' economics.In a number of respects Galbraith's countervailing power, his economics of oligopoly, the role of the technostructure outlined in the New Industrial State(1967) when combined yielded a more powerful model of capitalist behaviour than that of Keynes.
He got the idea of countervailing power from his extensive knowledge of both Veblen and Berle and Means( See Berle and Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property; and Thorstein Veblen`s works; The Theory of Business Enterprise, The Theory of the Leisure Class where Veblen developed his idea of conspicuous consumption that Galbraith uses in the Affluent society and in his later work; and Veblen`s The Higher Learning in America,The Engineers and the Price system, and his collection of Essays for the Dial Press.) The search for that countervail to corporate power and wealth inevitably led to the state, a much maligned force in contemporary society, which Galbraith believed could play such a benificent role as a regulator and source of control, particularly if it were under the influence of liberal Keynesian educated intellectuals like himself.
In many ways Galbraith was an American disciple of Keynes, but one who, unlike Keynes` patrician but Bloomsbury altered orientation, drew upon the deep wellspring of American populism best represented by Thorstein Veblen.
Veblen, himself, of Minnesota Scandinavian heritage and therefore a social democrat of sorts had an enormous influence upon Galbraith. Veblen`s classic works The Theory of Business Enterprise and The Engineers and the Price System can be very easily and usefully linked to Galbraith`s classic The New Industrial State. We owe a great debt to Galbraith for keeping alive these progressive traditions in writing about economics and economies and integrating them with the thrust of Keynesian economics that wisely pushed the depression and fascist plagued world of the 1930s toward democracy and social justice and full employment in the post world of the 1940s and beyond.
A giant like Ken Galbraith occurs infrequently in the course of economics and intellectual history. The neoclassical mainstream may not appreciate him much. But that is of no matter.
His greatness lay in his successful role as a public intellectual. Their smallness lies in their inability to speak to the public except in arcane and often irrelevant mathematical technique. The fact that many of them, though not by any means all, considered him a sociologist or journalist rather than a bona fide economist is a sign of how far toward irrelevance most of them have fallen.
Our sympathy to his family and friends.
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