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John Kenneth Galbraith died on Saturday at age 97. One of the most influential American public intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s, he was an iconoclastic and engaging social commentator. He had an uncanny ability to coin memorable phrases, two good examples being titles of his renowned books, The Affluent Society (1958) and The New Industrial State (1967).
He taught economics at Harvard for decades and was a prolific author of books and articles on economic affairs. His concept of the economy was not that of neoclassical or neo-Keynesian economics; rather; he adopted a rhetorical and sociological approach. Galbraith’s public prominence was a stark contrast to his reputation among most economists. His perspective was addressed repeatedly in the professional literature, and few of his academic peers were persuaded of its validity. As a result, his work did not have a significant impact on the mainstream of contemporary economics. This did not diminish the popular influence of his views, however.
One of his fundamental presuppositions was that comprehensive planning has replaced competition in the corporate sector. This planning flows inevitably from the nature of modern technology.
High technology and heavy capital use cannot be subject to the ebb and flow of market demand. They require planning; it is the essence of planning that public behavior be made predictable, that it be subject to control. (Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 2nd ed., rev. [1972], p. 310.)
According to Galbraith, the industrial system controls not only the behaviour of consumers, but also its suppliers of labour and capital, and even the state.
My interest here focuses on this question: What influences in Galbraith’s early life contributed to his view of the economy? Born in 1908 and raised on a farm near the hamlet of Iona Station, Ontario, he lived in south-western Ontario until he left Canada permanently in 1931. After earning his undergraduate degree at Ontario Agricultural College (OAC, now the University of Guelph), he departed for graduate studies at Berkeley, California. He never revealed much affection for his home town or the country of his birth. In his memoirs, he wrote about becoming an American citizen in 1937: “No one in history has done so with so small a sense of emotion, so slight a feeling of trauma.” (Galbraith, A Life In Our Times: Memoirs [1981], p. 70)
As it happens, I wrote a Master’s thesis on John Kenneth Galbraith while at Regent College twenty years ago. I read multitudinous books and articles by and about Galbraith. Fortunately, I still have copies of most of them. (The thesis itself was passable with occasional flashes of mediocrity. And, yes, some wags thought I should title it "Gilbreath On Galbraith"; it was tempting but I resisted.)
One of the best articles shone a spotlight on the genesis of his ideas. Although Galbraith rarely discussed his youth in the farming region of Elgin County, Ontario, Canadian historian Michael Bliss found evidence that this was a crucial period in Galbraith’s intellectual development. This is from “The Unconventional Wisdom of John Kenneth Galbraith”, by Michael Bliss, published in Saturday Night magazine, May 1981, pp. 17-28.
His father was a politically active and articulate agrarian leader. William Archibald Galbraith was an old Ontario Grit, a classic Canadian Liberal, deeply opposed to the system of tariff protection through which the Toronto corporate establishment taxed its agrarian fiefdom. Deprived by customs regulations of access to great American markets and cheap American consumer goods, these farmers scorned the self-interested nationalism of people whose principles and patriotism support their profits. Like the Veblens [a reference to sociologist/economist Thorstein Veblen and his family], like millions of North American farm families, the Galbraiths saw the new industrial plutocrats and their corporate power as a reincarnation of the old world aristocracy, the attempt to establish a new feudalism. People who lived and worked on the land despised the idle rich, their pointless affluence, their paid courtiers, their self-serving politics.
Two great events affected Ontario farmers during John Kenneth Galbraith's boyhood. In the First World War, he told me, his father’s deep cynicism about the military and its projects (notably to conscript farmers and their sons as extra cannon fodder) had a lasting impact. It lasted all the way to Vietnam and the distrust of the Pentagon that made Galbraith one of the war's first and most consistent opponents.
The other event was the political revolt of the United Farmers of Ontario after the war. The farmers were fed up with a political system run by the rich and the corporations. They had had enough of an urban establishment, its official ideology, and its kept politicians. The movement to create farmers' co-operatives, in which the elder Galbraith was deeply involved, transformed itself into a political movement, swept the province in 1919, and gave Ontario four years of fairly effective farmers' government. Galbraith senior broke with the Liberal Party to support the UFO. Galbraith junior has written that the leaders of the UFO, E. C. Drury and J. J. Morrison, were household names in Iona Station. He wrote this years ago as part of the introduction to the first J.J. Morrison Lecture, which he had been invited to give at OAC. Morrison, the theorist of the UFO, believed that big corporations had destroyed competition and laissez-faire economics. The only way to deal with corporate power was to organize and educate and use the power of the state against it.
The last two sentences are as concise a summary of Galbraith’s economic perspective as can be written.
Not just a product of the New Deal, or the Second World War, let alone the 1950s and 1960s, Galbraith really goes back to those classic battles of the common man, the simple farmer, against the rich and their money and their corporate power. Those battles go back to twenties and teens of this century and generations earlier — all the way back perhaps, before the Canadian border had any meaning at all, to Thomas Jefferson's America.Galbraith seems to be the last member of the UFO, fighting very old battles with old observations dressed up in modern language. The old UFO people would be Galbraithian economists to a man. Perhaps the battles do have to be fought over again in every generation. Passing the new glassy, glittering Federal Reserve Bank building in Boston, Galbraith points it out: "You can see what does well in hard times.” They've been saying that about the bankers for a long time.
Does it make sense? Is it reading too much into the economist's past? Re-read Galbraith with his agrarian background in mind. Re-read, especially, The Affluent Society, a book infused with austere contempt for modern rich societies and their "craving for more elegant automobiles, more exotic food, more erotic clothing, more elaborate entertainment” — indeed for the entire modern range of sensuous, edifying, and lethal desires. Galbraith has talked about The Affluent Society as a window. Just so. The window from Iona Station.
John Kenneth Galbraith fought the battles of populist agrarian socialism all his life. What does it say about Western society that his ideas resonated so strongly with so many people?
