Happy birthday, JK Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith turns 97 next Saturday. William Keegan has a nice tribute in The Observer today, Happy birthday, JK:

If ever there was a legend in his own lifetime, it is John Kenneth Galbraith, professor emeritus of Harvard University, adviser to Presidents from Roosevelt to Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, author of more than 40 books, and a man due to celebrate his 97th birthday next Saturday.

Known as JK Galbraith to most and Ken to his close friends, he is the tallest (at 6ft 8in) and oldest economist in America. He is also the most famous living economist in the world - and indeed the best-selling.

Here's how they met:

I first met Galbraith in 1980, after we at The Observer asked him - a redoubtable Keynesian - to comment on Mrs Thatcher's adoption of Milton Friedman's monetarist policies, under which unemployment rose to 3.5 million.

He famously wrote: 'Britain has, in effect, volunteered to be the Friedmanite guinea pig. There could be no better choice. Britain's political and social institutions are solid and neither Englishmen, Scots nor even the Welsh take readily to the streets.'

Galbraith has certainly lived to see Nemesis descend on Friedman. In the Financial Times of 7 June 2003, Friedman conceded: 'The use of quantity of money as a target has not been a success ... I'm not sure I would as of today push it as hard as I once did.'

Here are three short bios of him. For much more, see Richard Parker's new biography. MSNBC's Eric Alterman has a recent post with "a top-10, partial list of Galbraith’s controversial positions that turned out to be more correct than otherwise". Finally, ABC Radio's Background Briefing has the transcript of a recent speech by Richard Parker, and a short interview with Galbraith himself.

Comments

[AJE]

I think there's two ways one can view Milton Friedman's macroeconomics contributions, and understandebly followers of JKG will concentrate on just one.
Friedman's advocacy of monetarism can be seen as a means to an end: the end being the defeat of Keynesianism. He argued that the apparatus was wrong-headed, from within that system. The problem with such a strategy is that if you're successful in uncovering the problems with Keynesian thinking, your own posisitve contributions become similarly defeated.

I think it's myopic to view Friedman as a monetarist, and conclude that his contributions are somewhat undermined by evidence. His chief achievement was to show that Keynes had his curves wrong, and the conclusion is not new curves, but to dispense with the whole Keynesian ediface.

If we take a brief look throughout Europe today, we'll see the new, dynamic, exciting economies are entirely Friedmanite in their embrace of the flat tax, and commitment to rules vs discretion. Central banks are now seen as better controls of the economy than the government's budget defecit, and the Euro is testament to this shift in opinion. These are all policies more consistant with Friedman than Galbraith, and to suggest that the test of time has supported Galbraith over Friedman is simply wrong.

Happy Birthday Ken, and I hope you live longer, but your ideas should now be buried.

[Colman]

First, a deeply felt happy birthday to Galbraith. I didn't know he was still having them! I seem to have misread a news headline last year.

Second, to AJE, are you truly suggesting that we can compare economies playing catch-up from a half-century of gross and utter mismanagement with the mature social democracies and come up with the sort of conclusion you draw? Or indeed any conclusion?

[AJE]

Yes, I am.