Chronicle of Higher Education - May 1, 2006
John Kenneth Galbraith Is Remembered as a Mentor and Scholar By DAVID GLENN
John Kenneth Galbraith, who died on Saturday at the age of 97, was one of the most prominent American economists of the 20th century. He advised three generations of Democratic Party leaders, most visibly John F. Kennedy, for whom he served as U.S. Ambassador to India. And in best-selling books including American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (Houghton Mifflin, 1952) and The Affluent Society (Houghton Mifflin, 1958), he argued that certain kinds of New Deal-flavored government intervention could stabilize the national economy and promote social justice.
The iconoclastic Mr. Galbraith was also at the center of several bruising battles at Harvard University, where he taught for decades.
Liberal and left-wing economists -- including some whose assumptions and methods are very different from Mr. Galbraith's -- looked to him as a champion. "I know that he was 97 years old, but I cried this morning when I saw the news," Herbert Gintis, a visiting professor at Central European University, in Hungary, said in an interview on Sunday. "There is no one who can replace him, no one in economics who can say, 'Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.' They're all gone now."
Robert B. Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote in an e-mail message to The Chronicle that Mr. Galbraith "melded real-world experience with lofty theory, providing several generations of students and scholars with a deeper understanding of the micro-organization of American society."
Mr. Galbraith was born in 1908 in the small town of Iona Station, Ontario, which lies across Lake Erie from Cleveland. He earned a bachelor's degree in animal husbandry from Ontario Agricultural College, which he described decades later as "not only the cheapest but probably the worst college in the English-speaking world."
In 1930, as the Depression was intensifying across North America, Mr. Galbraith took a summer research position that involved interviewing tenant farmers in Ontario. The farmers' struggles deepened Mr. Galbraith's curiosity about economics, according to his biographer, Richard Parker, who is a senior fellow at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), Mr. Parker described the young Mr. Galbraith's puzzlement:
Farming was as close to neoclassical textbook perfection as existed, a world generally of small producers and small buyers (there were certainly exceptions) who competed sedulously, adopted new technologies, improvised new marketing strategies, sought out new customers -- all the things that in the modern equilibrium-based conception of free markets should guarantee success. And yet they didn't.
Mr. Galbraith's curiosity led him to apply for a graduate fellowship in agricultural economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He was a star student there, and in 1934 he briefly followed one of his Berkeley professors into the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, a New Deal agency that was charged with ameliorating the misery in rural America.
The same year, Mr. Galbraith began a position as an instructor at Harvard, where the economics department was deeply divided over the New Deal. Seven members of the department had just written a pamphlet denouncing Franklin Roosevelt's policies, warning that government intervention "leaves part of the work of depressions undone and adds to an undigested remnant of maladjustment."
But some younger faculty members, including Mr. Galbraith, were attracted to the emerging heretical ideas of John Maynard Keynes, who argued that national economies sometimes settle at equilibria with high levels of unemployment and low levels of consumption. In order to repair such disasters, Keynes wrote, governments should be willing to pour money into the economy, creating jobs and public investments that increase their citizens' aggregate purchasing power.
In 1937, those conflicts came to a head when Harvard's president, James Bryant Conant, fired two left-wing economics instructors, Alan Sweezy and Raymond Walsh, contrary to the economics department's recommendation that they be reappointed. In the ensuing fight, in which Mr. Conant ultimately prevailed, Mr. Galbraith was the most visible Harvard economist arguing on Mr. Sweezy's and Mr. Walsh's behalf, despite the fact that he himself did not have tenure.
Mr. Conant soon made clear that Mr. Galbraith was no longer welcome, and Mr. Galbraith departed for a series of positions at Princeton University, in the federal government, and at Fortune magazine.
A decade later, in 1948, the economics department at Harvard near-unanimously voted to offer Mr. Galbraith a tenured professorship. Mr. Conant approved the hire, but -- in a rare intervention -- the university's Board of Overseers acted to block the appointment.
Their intervention was apparently driven in part by a personal grudge: In 1945, Mr. Galbraith had worked on a classified government project that studied the effectiveness of U.S. bombing raids during World War II. Mr. Galbraith's conclusion was that the raids had done very little to injure the German economy or to slow the pace of Nazi military production. But some of the report's other authors -- including Charles Cabot, who was a Boston lawyer and a member of Harvard's Board of Overseers -- had bitterly disagreed.
But the overseers' attempted veto also had to do with their sense that Mr. Galbraith was simply too left-wing for Harvard. One member of the board, Clarence Randall, wrote a report to Mr. Conant in which he warned that the economics department already suffered from "one or more Socialists, some zealous followers of the British economist John Maynard Keynes, and some who advocate the extension of economic controls by Government."
After more than a year of behind-the-scenes wrangling, Mr. Conant finally persuaded the board to let the appointment stand. In his memoir, A Life in Our Times (Houghton Mifflin, 1981), Mr. Galbraith quipped that he later often thought about his foes on the Board of Overseers, and that he tried to "do whatever possible to justify their forebodings."
Mr. Galbraith did indeed continue to kick up dust at Harvard even decades later, after he had become a best-selling author and a household name. In the early 1970s, he was distressed that the department chose not to offer tenure to two left-wing junior faculty members, Samuel Bowles and Arthur MacEwan. Subsequently, he and four colleagues made an unsuccessful proposal to create a new department of social economy, which would have been more open to liberal policy proposals and less wedded to quantitative methods than the traditional economics department.
Mr. Gintis said that Mr. Galbraith will probably be remembered as a sociologist of the economy, in the tradition of Thorstein Veblen, rather than as an economic theorist per se. "If you look at his books," he said, "they're all literary-political works. They're not at all what economists do today. There are no models, no equations, no tables."
Mr. Reich sounded a similar note, saying that Mr. Galbraith "understood that economics is not a physical or mathematical science, but a social science, closer to sociology and psychology than to geometry or algebra."
Barbara R. Bergmann, a professor emeritus of economics at American University and the University of Maryland at College Park, studied at Harvard in the 1950s. She said on Sunday that Mr. Galbraith "was a wonderful wit, and he was very welcoming toward women students at a time when there weren't very many of us. That ought to be remembered."
Like Mr. Gintis, Ms. Bergmann fears that Mr. Galbraith has not left many heirs. "To be blunt, most economists are not too interested in the actual economy," she said. "Most economists are interested in technical theories about how the economy might behave."
Even during the 1950s, she said, when Harvard's economics department was dominated by center-left Keynesians whose economic beliefs were roughly congenial to Mr. Galbraith's, his interest in real-world institutions made him a lone wolf.