John Kenneth Galbraith: Prolific polemicist who revealed the human face...

[Yollam]

I post this because it dovetails somewhat with my post about Limbaugh and middle-class folks content to let the lower half rot.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1079133






Prolific polemicist who revealed the human face of money and power
By Stephanie Flanders
Published: May 1 2006 03:00 | Last updated: May 1 2006 03:00

Asked to name an economist, many Americans over the age of 30 would think of John Kenneth Galbraith, who has died at the age of 97. But he was both somewhat less and much more than a professional economist: he was an institution of postwar US life.

"After visiting Concord, Lexington, the Old North Church and Harvard, travellers are moved, however oddly, to view Galbraith," he once wrote. The elder statesman of the Harvard economics department, Galbraith was much else: a New Deal bureaucrat, war-time planner, journalist, adviser of presidents and presidential hopefuls, diplomat, novelist. And, always and until the last, a committed polemicist. "If you can't comfort the afflicted," he told Harvard graduands, "then afflict the comfortable."

Liberal activists who believed, with Galbraith, that economies neither could nor should be left to an invisible hand lost almost every major political battle of the 1970s and 1980s. Yet while the triumph of free-market economics took his ideas further from the political mainstream, they did not make them irrelevant.

Indeed, many of the dangers of untrammelled markets he had described in the 1950s and 1960s, not least the coexistence of "private opulence and public squalor", seem rather more obvious in George W. Bush's America than they had been in Eisenhower's or Kennedy's. The return of an income distribution that looks increasingly similar to that of a century ago must make his work increasingly relevant.

[oscar111]

1. JOBS FOR ALL site advisor.. galbraith

see my sig for a link to this eminent site with a timely idea

[Greeby]

2. 97, *sigh*

One can only hope to live so long :toast:

[peekaloo]

3. This deserves a k&r.

As excited as we are over Mr. Colbert this man and his life should not be overlooked.

[oscar111]

4. kik

kik