Recently it's books at the intersection of economics and political philosophy which have been on my reading list, as research for my own forthcoming works – a publication on Public Value for the BBC Trust, discussing how we put the principle into action, and my forthcoming magnum opus for Princeton University Press.
So, having dipped into Galbraith's The Great Crash of 1929, and quite liking that, I turned this week to The Affluent Society. It reminded me how much in general I don't like Galbraith's books. Certainly, he gave us some memorable phrases – conventional wisdom, private affluence and public squalor. And on the face of it, this is very much another title for our own times, with the conspicuous consumerism of the boom giving way to the nightmare public finances of the crash, not to mention degraded public realm in some western societies. Even so, The Affluent Society is a disappointing book.
Why? It's full of swipes against conventional economics, which might help explain my reaction. It also attacks, in an equally unreasoned and unevidenced way, big business, and is the forerunner of all of today's ideological diatribes against multinationals such as Noreena Hertz's truly atrocious Silent Takeover or Naomi Klein's somewhat better No Logo. I give Galbraith much credit for his early awareness of environmental problems but he didn't build on it constructively. This is a negative book, like the modern anti-capitalist literature: against growth, against business, and for active redistribution of incomes which – certainly if the pie has to shrink – is nothing more than class war posturing. (Yes, also back in fashion, at least here in the UK.)
But there's more to it than that. The Affluent Society is not analytical. It does not present arguments supported by evidence. It's a long rant with many non sequiturs and no clear flow of logic through the book. There is masses of rhetoric instead, but written in the most Latinate and ponderous style. I gave up counting the number of double negatives, for instance, one of Galbraith's favourite techniques for sounding impressive (I guess) – but in fact pompous and obfuscatory. Why does he have a reputation for being such a good writer? The book is in fact a hard slog, from which a few soundbites shine out of the page.
Of course, the book was and is a huge success, so millions of people see something in it that I don't. But I wonder how many in fact read it – or was it an equivalent to A Brief History of Time, which lingers unread on so many shelves?
I am sorry at your disappointment with the opinions that JK Galbraith expressed rather a long time ago. I am nearly 20 years younger than he was but even as a child I was aware the misery of the 1930s in the north of England, he saw much worse in Canada and the US and he held greedy and wicked men accountable, not the invisible hand of the market place. 'The past is another country, they do things differently there', the 1920s and 1930s were different from the 1990s and 2000s so we today should recognise that any historical analysis is bound to be at odds with our current views bolstered as they are by much more and more accurate data and the electronic means of digesting it. Newton said 'We stand on the shoulders of giants' Newton is a giant on whose shoulders others have hoisted themselves and Newtonian physics is no longer the last word. Galbraith's shoulders bear the weight of such as Stiglitz, Krugman and Sen. They don't echo his every word but probably wouldn't have got as far as they have had he not beaten an earlier path.
John Green
I know I'm in a tiny minority on Galbraith, and he certainly was a genius at capsule phrases such as 'conventional wisdom'. But it's not his opinions so much as the quality of his analysis and overall writing style that I struggle with.
Eric Hobsbawm as a young man was, surprised, in a survey of the recollections of celbrated economists of earlier times, by the vividness and detail of their accounts of events – which had never happened at all. I found and (re)read my 3/6(1961) Pelican on the 'The Great Crash of 1929' and found it to contain none of the views with which I had credited JK Galbraith – must have read it elsewhere or even made it up.
I do enjoy his writing style but the book is largely a journalists narrative of events with very limited analysis or insight. But there is a pexculiar sense of deja vu in reading a story which had such similarities with recent press outpourings, even a bank chairman who retired and was voted generous life pension of which, it transpired he had been the inspiration. And Galbraith would not have been surprised that, after more than half a century any energy invested in the SEC had been so dissipated that Maydoff could match or better the exploits of Ponzi and Kreuger.
Apologies
John Green