------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------  
Published by EH.NET (November 2006)  
  
Richard Parker, _John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His   
Economics_. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. x + 820 pp.   
$35 (cloth), ISBN: 0-374-28168-8.  
  
Reviewed for EH.NET by Peter J. Boettke, Department of Economics,   
George Mason University.  
  
  
During my undergraduate days I was taught to despise John Kenneth   
Galbraith as the arch-enemy of those who believed in the free market   
economy and limited government. In fact, Galbraith embodied   
everything that was wrong with the "eastern establishment" of   
academics and intellectuals. But while my main economics professor in   
undergraduate school left no doubt about his judgment on Galbraith's   
contribution to the field, he did encourage us to read Galbraith. My   
library to this day has almost a complete set of Galbraith's   
paperbacks that were purchased as an undergraduate. Besides my basic   
education in the classics in free market thought such as Smith,   
Bastiat, and Mises, I read Galbraith. I must admit that I read works   
like _The Affluent Society_ and _The New Industrial State_ with an   
intent to indict rather than to learn. But I did study them.  
  
When I headed off to graduate school I was asked immediately to   
prepare a paper responding to recent discussions in the professional   
journals. I headed off to the library and looked through the _AER_,   
_JPE_, and _QJE_ but nothing caught my imagination. Just as I was   
about to leave the library, I looked at the _Journal of Economic   
Issues_ and there was a long essay in it on John Kenneth Galbraith   
and in the article the claim was made that Galbraith had clearly   
defeated the economic ideas of F. A. Hayek. I was captivated by the   
argument in that paper, and though certainly not equipped to be a   
scholar of economics yet, I was in lawyerly mode and I decided to   
take on Hayek as my defendant and to make his case against the   
prosecution of Galbraith. After many revisions, and an entire shift   
in focus, this paper eventually became my paper assessing the   
commonalities and divergences between the Austrian School and the Old   
Institutionalists that was published in _Research in the History of   
Economic Thought and Methodology_.  
  
I respect Galbraith's ability to write, and I respect his desire to   
see economic policy as a force for good in society, but I do think   
that his economics and his politics are about as wrong-headed as an   
intellectual can produce, except to be completely bonkers. I am   
telling the reader this upfront because Richard Parker's biography of   
Galbraith is both outstanding and hagiographic. There is no doubt   
that Galbraith lived a fascinating life, far more exciting than any   
other economist of his generation except perhaps Milton Friedman, and   
even there Galbraith's brush with politics in the Kennedy   
Administration gives him a dimension to his life story that Friedman   
does not have. Even if we include Friedman's intellectual sway in   
both the Nixon and then Reagan administrations, he did not hold a   
public office the way Galbraith did.  
  
Galbraith's ability to write as an economist, again only rivaled by   
Friedman, put him at the cutting edge of policy discourse from 1950   
through the 1970s. So he lived a fascinating public life that touched   
on the major debates in public policy during the post-World War II   
period and through the social change of the 1960s and the crisis of   
confidence in the political system in the 1970s. But by the 1980s,   
Galbraith's influence was waning and that of Friedman's was on the   
ascendancy. When the real-existing socialist system collapsed in 1989   
and then in 1991, Galbraith's influence as a policy economist was   
relegated to the past.  
  
Parker makes the case, actually quite persuasively, that many of   
Galbraith's analytical ideas in economics are making a comeback in   
the name of behavioral economics. Men are not lightning calculators   
of pleasure and pain (as Veblen pointed out), but instead are caught   
between alluring hopes and haunting fears, susceptible to pressures   
from peers and the institutions within which they act, and confused   
over the options they face and the best course of action which   
presents itself. The rarified neoclassical model of utility   
maximization and the mode of perfect competition cannot explain how   
man really acts or how markets function in modern society.   
Galbraith's work, Parker suggests, anticipated these modern   
criticisms of the model of man, and the model of the market.  
  
That may, in fact, be so. Galbraith combined a smoothed-over Marxism   
with a watered-down Veblenism, to produce a wonderfully readable   
critique of a certain rendering of the market society and offer a   
mild form of Keynesian socialism as a solution to the instability and   
inhumanity of modern finance capitalism. But there are alternative   
critiques of that neoclassical rendering of market society which   
neither Galbraith nor Parker consider in any detail. The dreaded F.   
A. Hayek, for example, did not rely on a model of man engaged in   
relentless maximizing nor of the market as ruthlessly efficient. But   
Hayek's work is nowhere engaged in a subtle way by either Galbraith   
nor Parker in this biography. It is Hayek who was haunted by   
Galbraith, certainly not the other way around (despite the gratuitous   
slaps at Hayek that one can read in Galbraith).  
  
Parker writes his biography from the point of view of Galbraith's   
obvious intellectual victory and thus the political tides turning   
against his form of Progressivism in the 1980s is a reflection of the   
world gone mad rather than Galbraith's arguments (and those of Marx,   
Veblen and Keynes on which his arguments were based) being proven   
wrong analytically and empirically. With such confidence of ultimate   
vindication, Parker writes a biography that sees Galbraith's   
contributions as unassailable and the ebbs and flows of his   
intellectual influence as being an issue of politics and never one of   
the force of the argument.  
  
Clearly Galbraith possessed a great skill to write essays in   
persuasion. These essays were especially persuasive to those   
untrained in economic reasoning, yet desiring to offer opinion on   
economic policy. The claim that his ideas will have a lasting   
influence in economics must be judged to be dubious. First, his   
originality as an economic thinker is not obvious. His ideas are   
derivative of Marx, Veblen and Keynes and in a fundamental sense he   
did not advance the argument beyond where he inherited it from them.   
Second, his writings were directed at the general public more than   
they were his peers in the academy so that his economic history as   
well as his intellectual history work is quite suspect as exercises   
in scholarship and cannot withstand scrutiny.  
  
Galbraith's lasting legacy will be in the idea of the economist as   
public intellectual. Perhaps no economist has ever been able to write   
better than Galbraith. Moreover, he was an extremely charming man.   
Several years ago, when the HES meeting were held at Babson College,   
Lawrence Moss arranged for me to sit next to Galbraith at dinner. I   
was a young upstart Austrian economist and I think Larry got a kick   
out of the idea of me sitting next to Galbraith for the evening. I   
have never been more taken with an individual over dinner   
conversation that the great John Kenneth Galbraith. I was regaled   
with stories of FDR, the Kennedy family (especially Jacqueline) and   
his debates with William Buckley and Milton Friedman. At the end of   
the evening it was me who was running to get coffee and Boston cream   
pie for Galbraith. He was a phenomenal dinner partner. However, it is   
important to remember that when he rose to address the History of   
Economic Society that evening, he didn't address a concern with the   
intellectual history of economics, but instead the importance of   
economic history as a discipline. I understand that Galbraith was a   
very old man at this time, but in a fundamental sense he just never   
got the idea of economic scholarship throughout his career. He got   
the idea of economic persuasion, and economic policy -- and with that   
political struggles in a democratic society. But he did not   
understand economic argument, institutional analysis, and empirical   
examination at a standard that would be acceptable to his peers. He   
was an economic journalist who happened to teach at Harvard. Galbaith   
was an extremely talented journalist, and obviously a very brilliant   
public intellectual. But he was a literary figure, not a scientific   
one.  
  
Parker has written a biography of Galbraith without acknowledging   
this fact. So while Parker's biography is fantastic and   
comprehensive, it is ultimately flawed from the point of view of   
critically assessing Galbraith's life as an economist. Galbraith as a   
subject is outstanding because he was so involved with the history of   
American liberalism from FDR's "New Deal" to Johnson's "Great   
Society" -- and we cannot forget his fundamental place within the   
Camelot years of the Kennedy Administration. Galbraith's personal   
story is also fascinating -- how a man from rural Canada could become   
perhaps the symbol of the urbane liberal intellectual in America in   
the twentieth century is a fascinating tale to tell. But the ideas of   
American liberalism ran afoul of a refractory reality. The ideas of   
Marx, Veblen and Keynes were wrong when they were first articulated   
by those thinkers, and they were wrong in the derivative formation in   
the hands of Galbraith. The intellectual paradigm of   
Marx-Veblen-Keynes cannot understand why markets work the way they   
do, and they cannot understand why the policies of social control   
they inspire don't work as planned. The Marx-Veblen-Keynes agenda not   
only provides a bad framework for analysis and a poor tool for a   
policy of social control, but when utilized as an interpretive   
framework it produces a distorted view of history. Galbraith embodied   
all three intellectual failings.  
  
Despite the charm, despite the skill at writing, and despite his   
stature as a professor at Harvard, Galbraith must be judged to have   
been a brilliant intellectual failure. Parker is unable to see that.   
He has written as good a biography of Galbraith as any follower of   
Galbraith could have hoped for. It is well-written, deeply   
researched, and full of information which any reader will benefit   
from. What it isn't is a critical assessment of Galbraith the   
economist and his place in the discipline of political economy.  
  
  
Peter J. Boettke is a Professor of Economics and Director of Graduate   
Studies in Economics at George Mason University. Boettke recently was   
the 2006 Hayek Fellow at the London School of Economics. His list of   
books and journal publications can be found at:   
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/pboettke.  
  
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