Public Philosopher

WHEN I TRY to picture John Kenneth Galbraith, I see him skiing down a Swiss slope, training a sardonic eye on the orgy of conspicuous consumption in the valley below. That valley is one of the posh places of the affluent society. Progress and plenty seem to reign there, but Galbraith has taught us that this appearance masks economic irrationality and social squalor.

Galbraith has made a fortune from delivering such bad news. That his books have sold in the millions should nevertheless discourage invidious generalization about the best-seller list, for they are of the highest literary quality. He has written twenty-one, including two novels; a learned treatise on Indian painting; a disquisition on the market system of the Puerto Rican waterfront; a trilogy on political economy, which comprises The Affluent Society (1958), The New Industrial State (1967), and Economics and the Public Purpose (1973); and now these memoirs.

Galbraith’s signature as a stylist is his famous irony, and if we sometimes feel, with Robert Heilbroner, that “Galbraith’s mocking irony causes him in the end to avoid a clear moral commitment with regard to the problems he raises,” more often we respond to its energy, its sinewed feeling. That energy may end in delight, but it begins in anger. And it is nothing if not committed. Behind the ironic manner, this book makes clear, is a tough customer, a man equally formidable in intellectual and practical endeavor. Behind it, too, is a radical critic of our political economy.

John Kenneth Galbraith was born in 1908 in Dunwich Township, Ontario, near the western end of Lake Erie. About the significant people and experiences of his Ontario childhood his memoirs add little to what he related in The Scotch (1964), a charming group portrait of the proud, unyielding, resourceful tribe to which The Galbraiths belonged. The Scotch, as they are called in Canada (but not in Scotland: Galbraith had to title the British edition The Non-Potable Scotch, to dispel ambiguity), settled in Ontario after being forced off their Highland farms by the enclosure movement of the eighteenth century, “when their lairds discovered that sheep were both more profitable and, as they moved over the hillside, more rewarding to the eye.”

more Galbraith’s father was the head of a cooperative insurance firm and the master of two extensive farms (whose fields young Galbraith often plowed). By the standards of the countryside, the senior Mr. Galbraith was a considerable figure: “for around half a century . . . the leading liberal of the community,” he was the cynosure of political discussion and instruction. But by the standards of the town, he was a hick; and this polarity of intellectual superiority and social inferiority was to fuse in the character of his son: “My legacy was the inherent insecurity of the farm-reared in combination with an aggressive feeling that I owed it to all I encountered to make them better informed.” From the hard school of the farm there was a further legacy: “a deeply valid appreciation of the nature of manual labor.” The first legacy made Galbraith superior, but the second makes him morally attractive.

Until his retirement, in 1975, Galbraith was a Harvard professor, but he is not a Harvard man. His alma mater is Ontario Agricultural College. There he studied

. . . animal husbandry, field husbandry . . . butterand cheesemaking, butchering and meat-cutting, apiculture, botany . . . farm management, agricultural engineering, soil management, horticulture, forestry, surveying, veterinary medicine, as well as a range of, to me, more practical courses, of which the most durably useful were English composition and plumbing, the latter known to my more casually spoken classmates as “pumps and shithouses.”

After graduate education at Berkeley and Cambridge (he holds a Ph.D. in agricultural economics), he held a series of posts in the Roosevelt Administration, serving briefly as one of FDR’s speechwriters in the 1940 campaign (Galbraith was a Democrat before he was a citizen). In 1941, on the strength of a paper outlining the Keynesian approach to price control, he took a giant step in his career by becoming the director of the Office of Price Administration, “the most powerful civilian post in the management of the wartime economy.”

The ironic detachment of Galbraith the writer gives no clue to the energetic involvements of Galbraith the man of affairs. To list the subsequent stages of his career—director of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy’s ambassador to India, founding member of the ADA, organizer (among others) in 1967 of the “Dump Johnson” movement—would be to give away the itinerary of this delightfully teeming book. Perhaps it is enough to say that when, in the midst of an account of Democratic politics in the fifties, we come across the sentence “In those years I was also concerned with Puerto Rico,” we are hardly surprised: such an indefatigability gets around to everything, sooner or later. A few paragraphs on, he is boring into the problems of Canadian railroads.

“TRUTH,” SAYS GALBRAITH in a characteristic formulation, “is not always coordinate with modesty.” However, it is remarkable how often in A Life in Our Times truth is coordinate with self-praise. Thus, by his own account, Galbraith did a great job at the OPA; Stevenson loved his speeches (“Ken, I want you to write the speeches against Nixon. You have no tendency to be fair”); Kennedy savored his letters from India; Nehru took him to his heart; and he made a decisive contribution to ending the Sino-Indian war of 1962. To be sure, the Harvard Board of Overseers tried to deny him an appointment, and it took a threat of resignation from President James B. Conant to change their minds. But the book brushes past such reversals to stress triumphs.

Galbraith is particularly voluble about his prescience. Thus, regarding the rights of women at “Harvard Before Democracy,” he is pleased to point out that he stood—alone, one would gather from his text —in the vanguard of reform. On inflation, on Vietnam, on the dubious prospects of the community-action wing of the Office of Economic Opportunity, Galbraith, he assures us, was wiser than the men around him. Probably he was. But he says so just a little too often. When his ironic persona drops its guard and vanity is bare of wit, the FBI’s verdict on Galbraith seems just right: “Investigation favorable except conceited, egotistical, and snobbish.” With relief we encounter the rare expression of regret, unwisdom, and self-doubt.

EXCEPT FOR AN admirably terse mention of a son’s death from leukemia, Galbraith has nothing to say about his personal life: “My life has been without the agony that sustains interest . . . and which encourages the associated introspection.” A Life in Our Times is a public autobiography; there is no agony in it. It is one of the funniest books in recent years.

A survey of Galbraith’s comic rhetoric should start with his use of overstatement: “As a military ally,” he writes to President Kennedy from India, “the entire Laos nation is clearly inferior to a battalion of conscientious objectors from World War I.” It should touch on his penchant for deadly understatement: “Andrew Mellon’s difficulties with the income tax had not yet brought the National Gallery as a requital.” It should admire his command of the periodic sentence and the comedy of billowing rhythm: “That the individual worker, needing regularly to eat, often committed to a mortgage, and in doubt as to alternatives, can deal on equal terms with the large corporate buyer of labor can be believed only after much careful training.” It should applaud his pacing: “The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary; no economist should be denied it, and not many are.” It should note his vivid epithets: “A certifiably cretinous interviewer” vies with an author of “terminal superficiality” as my favorite. Finally, it should single out his diction. This might be described as “Samuel Johnson meets the Marx Brothers,” since it features rare words in demotic contexts.

All of this merely constitutes the texture of Galbraith’s prose. The book is also replete with straightforwardly hilarious anecdotes about personages such as Bernard Baruch and Lyndon Johnson and every scene is staged with vaudeville timing. Galbraith’s comic voice is a distinctive and durable literary achievement. It can even get laughs from the dismal science.

A PROFESSIONAL APPRAISAL OF Galbraith’s work as an economist must await a professional. Still, if we see him primarily as a public philosopher, then we can appraise his central vision without having to answer questions of empirical validation and logical method better left to the experts.

Galbraith is not nearly so well regarded by economists as he is by the general public. One economics textbook gives a quotation from his work and then comments, “Explain why every sentence of that quotation—except the third and fourth—is wrong, nonsensical, or irrelevant.” For his part, Galbraith invites such attacks by strongly implying that many of his fellow economists are hirelings of the large corporations.

At the center of Galbraith’s work is a concern not so much with the economy as with our mental image of the economy. In his view, this is likely to be false; and certainly it is false if we have been trained in neoclassical economics, “the traditional irrelevancy.” Galbraith is in the great tradition of critical philosophy. What he wants is to rid our minds of the false ideas we use to interpret reality and to replace them with valid ones. Reversing Kant, he must eliminate faith to make room for knowledge. The faith he must eliminate is the faith in the free market; that it does not operate over a large sector of the economy is the knowledge we must accommodate.

Our understanding of economic society is ruled, famously, by “the conventional wisdom,” which holds that the economy is made up of “numerous entrepreneurial firms . . . all subordinate to their market and thus . . . to the instruction of the consumer.” Competition among firms guarantees that goods will not be overpriced. Firms have no important power over their markets—that is, over the demand for their products. They are also “without organic power in the state” —that is, over the management of aggregate demand. The odd monopoly exists but is regarded as an irregularity. To Galbraith, this image of the economy has seemed false ever since he was the price czar during World War II and discovered that “it was relatively easy to fix prices that had already been fixed.” However, he appreciates the political uses of the conventional wisdom: as he wrote in Annals of an Abiding Liberal,

Are its prices too high? The corporation is blameless. Prices are set by the market. Are profits unseemly? They too are determined by the market. Are products deficient in safety, durability, design, usefulness? They only reflect the will of the sovereign consumer. ... Is there adverse effect on the environment? If so, it reflects . . . the higher preference of people for the goods being produced as opposed to the protection of air, water or landscape.

The “valid image” of the economy is much less agreeable, for where the conventional wisdom posits freedom it reveals power. The valid image is of a “bimodal” economy. Galbraith argued in the same book that fully 50 percent of our private economic product is produced by the half of this economy {made up of between 10 and 12 million small businesses) that conforms to the free-market image. With the other half, the case is different. Dominated by 1000 to 2000 giant firms, it is ruled not by the market but by “a power or planning system.” Through advertising and such grosser practices as price-fixing, the large corporation exerts power over its markets. The men in charge, Galbraith contended in The New Industrial State, are more concerned with long-term growth than with short-term profit. To secure growth they must avoid the entrepreneur’s risk that the consumer will buy someone else’s product. They therefore seek to channel the consumer’s choices and to manipulate his whims.

Since power and economics are thus intimately joined in the planning system, they must likewise be joined in our image of the economy. The conventional wisdom must give way to the news that “when the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in form and degree but not in kind from the state itself.” Society must contend with this political instrument politically, by asserting public purposes over those of the firm. Such purposes include an interest in survival (Galbraith sees the large firm as deeply connected to defense procurement); an interest in a healthy environment; and an interest in quality products. Where is this galvanized public to come from? Galbraith’s answer—from the universities and especially from the intellectual/scientific elite—is a desperate gesture, which does not do justice to his analysis. That stands as an impressive and radical achievement.

QUESTIONS PRESS, FIRST, since Galbraith fails to outline a convincing tics to achieve the public purpose, is he simply a dreamy idealist? The fact is that he is a materialist who believes that social reality will one day prevail over the ideas we use to interpret it, and that this will have a political result.

Second, is Galbraith a socialist? Not in any programmatic sense. He is for what works. On the showing of our more productive friends, such as Sweden, Germany, and Japan, what works best is a mixed economy—public planning in the corporate sector, and a market economy in the entrepreneurial sector.

Third, does his economics help with our immediate problems, controlling inflation and increasing productivity? While his image of the economy as divided into a planning sector and an entrepreneurial sector elucidates the coexistence of inflation and recession {wage-price controls are the indicated remedy), Galbraith slights the problem of productivity. (“No one would be called upon to write at such length on a problem so easily solved as that of increasing production,” he wrote twenty-three years ago in The Affluent Society. One suspects it is a sentence he regrets.) In his defense, the theme of The Affluent Society is that exclusive preoccupation with the quantity of goods produced blinds us to the quality and kind of goods produced. A society in which everyone owns a television set but in which public transportation is unsafe, unsanitary, and inefficient may be productive on paper. Eventually, however, its neglect of social infrastructure will catch up with it. Its streets will clog; its goods will move more slowly and more precariously; its productivity will decline.

Finally, Galbraith’s model of the planning system is vulnerable to refutation by recent example. If the large corporation controls its market, how did Chrysler fail? This seems to contradict one Galbraith postulate, and it is true that The New Industrial State, written in the boom economy of the mid-sixties, depicts the corporation as an irresistible engine of success. Yet an answer—a tediously elaborate one, consistent with Galbraith’s premises—is possible. And while Chrysler’s failure might force Galbraith to casuistry to save one of his postulates, the government bail-out confirms another: that the state and the corporation are linked, notwithstanding the conventional wisdom.

In 1981, one of Galbraith’s titles must seem especially poignant. Now is not The Liberal Hour. Rut when the conventional wisdom fails to solve our economic difficulties, when what Galbraith has recently termed “the war of the rich on the poor” has called forth a countervailing assertiveness from the poor themselves, when the abandonment of the public sector and the neglect of the social balance begin to hurt the middle class, then the liberal hour will return. Then, too, Galbraith’s ideas will help direct us to the real problems of our economy. □