John Kenneth Galbraith, Revisited
For all his attributes, John Kenneth Galbraith was not what the American Left believes him to have been: a font of economic truth.
"In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong." John Kenneth Galbraith, who died at the age of 97 on April 29, said that to Britain's Guardian newspaper in 1989. Was any American economist of comparable esteem so wrong—so comfortably and contentedly wrong, and for so many years—as Galbraith himself? Verily, I cannot think of a rival.
Galbraith, let me say, was a brilliant public intellectual; an elegant (if tending to the orotund) writer; a remarkably accomplished and productive man; and, by all accounts (setting his legendary immodesty aside: He actually boasted about his immodesty), a good man. He was not, however, what he apparently thought he was, or what the American Left believes him to have been: a font of economic truth; the intellectual heir to John Maynard Keynes, no less; a paradigm-shifting thinker to rival the opposing champion of free markets, Milton Friedman.
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Become a SubscriberGalbraith, despite the Harvard professorship, was never really an economist in the ordinary sense in the first place. In one of countless well-turned pronouncements, he said, "Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists." He disdained the scientific pretensions and formal apparatus of modern economics—all that math and numbers-crunching—believing that it missed the point. This view did not spring from mastery of the techniques: Galbraith disdained them from the outset, which saved time.
