RIP: John Kenneth Galbraith

The great liberal economist and thinker John Kenneth Galbraith died on Saturday. Galbraith was a towering figure in postwar American government and scholarship. (New York Times obituary) He served important roles in America's war effort bureaucracy during World War II (overseeing the effort to fight inflation by setting prices on key commodities), found after the war that the US bombing efforts against Germany and Japan had not helped shorten the conflict, and later served as an ambassador to India under John F. Kennedy.

A lifelong Keynesian who continuously argued against the simpleminded idea that capitalism could be trusted to benefit all members of a society, Galbraith was a member of the Harvard economics department since 1949. From that perch, he wrote important and lucid works that critiqued the overimportance of big business and "the assumption that continually increasing material production is a sign of economic and societal health" (Wikipedia). His overriding worry, as an economist, democrat, and Democrat, was that capitalism would transform the United States into a "democracy of the fortunate" in which only those with high incomes would have real political power.

Galbraith was also a skilled writer, thanks to five years working as an editor under Henry Luce at Fortune in the Forties. Among other evidence of his writing abilities, Galbraith coined the phrase "conventional wisdom" (and not as a way of flattering public opinion) and the aphorism, "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite." He loved to talk about the art of writing:

Never to assume that your first draft is right. The first draft, when you're writing, involves the terrible problem of thought combined with the terrible problem of composition. And it is only in the second and third and fourth drafts that you really escape that original pain and have the opportunity to get it right. Again, I'm repeating myself; I've said many times that I do not put that note of spontaneity that my critics like into anything but the fifth draft. It may have a slightly artificial sound as a consequence of that.

Among other good quotes listed in the Wikipedia entry on him is this: "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."