John Kenneth Galbraith died on Saturday

[hfojvt]

memorial essay by Katrina Van den Heuvel

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0430-24.htm

review of a biography of Galbraith, and my comments on that:

http://www.johnkennethgalbraith.com/index.php?page=press&display=39&from=

A few contradictions strike me in Rauchway's review of Galbraith. He closes by asking "what makes a Galbraith". However, he implies that Galbraith is who he is because he writes, not because of "what" he knows and writes. Earlier he said that Galbraith did not want "to reproduce himself in a hundred acolyte doctoral students" but it seems to me that that would have been the surest way to have more "Galbraiths" around.
But Rauchway, or Parker, seem to make Galbraith more of a seer than a scholar, and seems to indicate that he did more hob-nobbing with celebrities than he did studying ("Galbraith in truth would much rather have spent an evening with Jackie Kennedy than with a stack of fresh off-prints from the university presses. What really galled the envious was that he could, and did.") Perhaps that was where his predictive abilities came from - inside information from the movers and shakers rather than studying history and statistics.
The question "why didn't they listen" seems kinda naive. From the first example, not listening to Galbraith resulted in a policy that "hurt the ordinary saver and benefited a few oligopolists". So why didn't they listen? Because policy makers listen to and work for oligopolists, not ordinary savers. Duh. Isn't that fairly basic Marxism?
Rauchway also mentions the Laffer curve (and implies that Galbraith was one of very few who saw it as flawed). Since I was taking economics at the University of Minnesota in the spring of 1981, I can vouch for the fact that economists there expressed doubt about it. In fact, "Laffer" was an ironic name for a theory widely held to be a joke. The really disheartening thing is that the doubt of 1981 was answered by the experiment of ERTA with a loud "no" but this is still denied by many politicians and pundits and the facts of this do not seem to be widely known.
It is oligopolists, once again, spreading misinformation which they think will benefit them. It is against that onslaught that "writing does not change enough minds to matter" but that doesn not stop the oligopolists and their shills from writing. Now if only there were hundreds of Galbraith educated doctoral students who were in turn teaching hundreds of University students ...

[FloridaPat]

1. When I was a senior in college, I had to read an article by him.

I could not understand a thing. Most of the words in the article I had never seen before either He was way over my heard.

[Inland]

2. I need to find the passage from Galbraith

in which he describes American leaving their expensive homes to drive in their luxury cars down potholed streets and delapidated schools. The picture of someone believing themselves rich in that circumstance was compelling. I've always appreciated his attitude that America doesn't value any public goods.