------------ 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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Published by EH.Net (November 2006). All EH.Net reviews are archived
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