John Kenneth Galbraith is the personification of Liberalism. And if you want a detailed insight into what the enduring essence of Liberalism is, not as it is defined by its political enemies, but by its greatest exponent in America, this lengthy, detailed, and highly readable biography of Galbraith is for you. Ambitious in its scope and breadth, this book is far more than a "life" of Galbraith. You get three books for the price of one here. You get, of course, a biography of Galbraith, a man of considerable brilliance who led a fascinating life. You get a history of American polity, particularly in economics, from the Depression to the close of the Twentieth Century. And perhaps most important, you get the story of how Galbraith's central ideal, the ideal of an intelligent public policy exercised by democratically elected government has fared in America during this period.
Central to Galbraith's economics is the belief that representative government can be a powerful force for good, and (to use Galbraith's term) an essential "countervailing power" to private interest. Starting with Galbraith's career as an agricultural economist in the New Deal, and going to the end of the Clinton administration, Parker's book follows Galbraith's responses to, and in some cases impact upon, the key events and political and economic controversies of the times. Along the way the reader gains a detailed insight into how the post-WWII American consensus of a partnership between government, business, and labor, committed to the common good, began to break down in the 1970s and 1980s, and how we arrived at today's "conventional wisdom" (another term that Galbraith coined) that cynically practices the self-fulfilling prophecy that nothing beneficial can emanate from the public sector.
For those who are particularly interested in academic economics, this biography gives a fascinating account of Galbraith's long battle against the rise of a brand of mathematical microeconomics uninterested in any so-called "exogenous" factors such as observable facts and real-world issues, and which had nothing to offer in social policy beyond, as Parker writes, "a future of endless consumption of endlessly more goods." As an alternative to the metric of "allocational efficiency" (for example, "just in time" practices, outsourcing jobs to cut costs) Galbraith proposed an alternative metric he called "the minimization of social tension." Although Galbraith is often now considered marginalized by his political and intellectual opponents, this book makes a powerful case for revisiting his approach to economics as being inseparably linked to institutional, political, and even psychological issues. As Parker writes, Galbraith's approach to economics is concerned above all with "the fundamental issue of how societies and civilizations work".
Now more than ever this book is a necessary reminder of why Galbraith's voice is of continuing relevance. Parker, himself an eminent economist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, has succeeded with a light touch in highlighting the resonance today of Galbraith's approach to basic questions of public policy. Often his narrative of Galbraith's thinking on an issue he faced at a particular point in his career suggests a critique of the economic policies being pursued today. Galbraith the economist, the writer, and the public figure was all too often right when the "conventional wisdom" was wrong. His highly literate and often ironic expression of unpopular views are well worth listening to, from the ineffectiveness of strategic bombing in World War II, to the disastrous American involvement in Vietnam, to the true economic, moral, political, and opportunity costs of the militarization of America in the Cold War, to the Social Darwinism which is the all-too-inevitable consequence of untrammeled worship of "the market" as "the omniscient, the omnipotent, the omnipresent metric by which all was to be measured", and which replaced the old partnership consensus starting in the 1980's.
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Top reviews from other countries
ogilvie
great book; strong on historical context
Reviewed in Canada on July 10, 2011
D. Anderson
Galbraith - Richard Parker
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 6, 2009Michel Lemieux
Excellent bouquin sur la vie d'un homme formidable qui a ...
Reviewed in Canada on July 13, 2014
Mike England
JKG. One of the best !
Reviewed in Canada on February 6, 2016
Mike England
Reviewed in Canada on February 6, 2016
Impressive author.
So articulate and in possession of a dry sense of humour !
One of many great Canucks !
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