ABC Radio National - Background Briefing: 31 July  2005  - J. K. Galbraith

[This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s1423535.htm]

Program Summary

Adviser to presidents, influential and respected economist, J.K. Galbraith is now 97. He has 52 PhDs and has written 48 books, and his name attracts countless hits on the web. Biographer Richard Parker gives a picture of the man.

Program Transcript

Kirsten Garrett: This is Background Briefing on ABC Radio National. I’m Kirsten Garrett, and here now is a mystery voice. See if you can guess. A clue: He’s an economist.

John Kenneth Galbraith: And let us bear in mind that William Shakespeare was the product of a country with a very low Gross National Product, or Gross Domestic Product. Let us realise that there are achievements, very great achievements, that are outside of the field of economics. "Let us bear in mind that William Shakespeare was the product of a country with a very low Gross National Product"Let us bear in mind that Darwin, who had an enormous effect on all social thought, was not equipped with a large remunerative staff. We have a large range of artistic and scientific achievement which still depends on separate human intelligence.

Kirsten Garrett: It’s John Kenneth Galbraith, speaking in August, 2002, when he was 93 years old. This year he will turn 97, and still going strong. And a biography of him has just been released, written by his friend and fellow economist, Richard Parker.

Galbraith himself has written 48 books, many of them bestsellers. He has been a hugely influential political economist all his life, and though his Keynesian economics are no longer dominant, Galbraith remains a revered figure. He is still intellectually active, and maintains that economics is anything but a dismal and desiccated science. Over a long lifetime, he’s been given no less than 52 PhDs from places like Oxford and Harvard, and the Sorbonne.

Galbraith’s biographer, Richard Parker, was one of the founders of ‘The Atlantic Monthly’ magazine, and he’s also an economist who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Richard Parker, like Galbraith, calls himself an ‘unapologetic Democrat’. And he gave a talk about Galbraith’s life at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco some weeks ago. This today is an edited version of that talk, and later in the program you will hear more from J.K. Galbraith himself.

APPLAUSE

Richard Parker: It’s important to understand that Ken was not born to the Manor, despite the style, which many of you have seen him display. He’s the son of a small-town Canadian farmer, and his wife, and he was born in rural Ontario at the dawn of the 20th century, upstairs in a farmhouse. He went to a one-room schoolhouse for the first eight years of his life, and graduated ultimately from Ontario Agricultural College with a major in animal husbandry.

Many years later, he was invited back to OAC to receive an honorary degree, and in the process was interviewed by Time Magazine, and, in typical Galbrathian fashion, remarked that in his day he thought that OAC had been the cheapest and worst university in the English-speaking language. There was some umbrage taken, as you might imagine, by the alumni and administration, and on second thought, Galbraith thought it best to recant, and so he did it, but again in typically Galbraithian fashion. He contacted Time Magazine and said that he wished to apologise; he had in fact realised that undoubtedly Arkansas, NM, was a worse college, but simply hadn’t been certain that they spoke English.

That sense of humour, that wit, was not intrinsic to Galbraith, but an inheritance from his father, Archie Galbraith, a figure of some prominence in local Ontario politics, a stalwart of the Canadian Liberal party for many years, and it was from Archie that Ken first learned the importance of taking a stand in one’s life, when it came to matters of great import to the community.

It was not, though, just inheritance, but early on, experience that made Galbraith the main he was. He came here to California as the Depression was unfolding; Herbert Hoover was in the White House, and Franklin Roosevelt had not yet announced his candidacy. He saw men and women living in shanty towns;"He was a graduate student at Berkeley when the great San Francisco strike broke out and he has vivid memories of that conflict as well as the numerous demonstrations in the 1930s." he was in fact a graduate student at Berkeley, when the great San Francisco strike broke out here, and he has vivid memories of that conflict, as well as the numerous demonstrations that were held even then, in the 1930s, on the campus at Berkeley. He took from that college experience a formation of commitments that were to serve him the rest of his life.

His first job out of graduate school, when he graduated in 1934, was to be as a young instructor at Harvard University. But he simultaneously took up a first summer’s job working in Washington for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and it was there he said that he acquired his first searing lesson in the importance of never imagining that economics is very far away from politics, or the questions of politics and economics far away from the question of power. That summer, President Roosevelt’s program to lift agricultural prices, the initial payments of crop supports to farmers who did not plant, that was meant to bring up farm incomes and stabilise the suffering of so many millions of American farmers, was getting under way, and it was working well for the wheat farmers; it was working well for the cotton farmers. But in the summer of 1934, a question arose of quite significant magnitude for the New Deal and for liberalism itself. And the question was about cotton. And the question was, ‘Who should receive the Federal government’s money for not planting cotton?’

There were two groups: One was a handful of wealthy, white plantation owners, the other was a much larger group, African-American and white alike, of sharecroppers and tenant farmers who did all the work of raising cotton. And there was of course, a division about who should receive millions upon millions of dollars from the Federal government to alleviate the suffering in the cotton belt of the United States. And Galbraith vividly recalls a young colleague being summoned from the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, up to Capitol Hill to meet with ‘Cotton Ed’ Smith, Senior Senator from the State of South Carolina, Chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and by coincidence, himself a plantation owner of some significance in South Carolina. And the words that ‘Cotton Ed’ Smith shared with that young boy, or which the lawyer then shared with Galbraith a few hours later that same day, have always stayed with Professor Galbraith.

‘Cotton Ed’ Smith said, ‘You take care of the payments, we’ll take care of the niggers’.

It was, for Galbraith, in that moment, a Canadian, a white Canadian who’d grown up without the experience of racial politics, certainly the racial politics of the United States, a moment that never left him. But it also underscored for him, the difficulties that liberalism in America faced. Because ultimately, Franklin Roosevelt gave in and made the payments to the plantation owners because the Senior Senators, who were predominantly from the South, who controlled crucial committee chairs in the Senate, indicated to Roosevelt that they would simply bottle up Social Security. They would bottle up legislation-reforming labour law, they would bottle up every other major piece of legislation that Roosevelt wanted to get through unless he co-operated with them on this issue. And so he did.

Now from that experience, Ken Galbraith didn’t retreat. He didn’t condemn politics. He didn’t abandon liberalism. He didn’t abandon conscience. He got to work. At Harvard, he quickly discovered John Maynard Keynes, the English economist whose general theory forms the cornerstone of all modern economics, in policy and in theory. What was Keynes’ innovation? Well the economics that had been taught up until then is the one that still is taught in many ways to undergraduates today, and is the one we hear echoed in the business press every time we open its pages or hear it on television or the radio. Which is that markets left alone by government created the best of all possible economic worlds. Left alone, all factors of production, labour, capital, natural resources, will be efficiently allocated by the mechanism of price, and there really is no significant function for government to play in that, and when it does attempt to enter into market relations, of course it mucks them up and makes things worse, not better.

But at the height of the Depression, a quarter of Americans were out of work; the Stock Market had fallen by 90%. It was literally like Flanders Field, in many parts of the country economically. And in this situation, Keynes, who himself had been trained in that orally or conservative tradition said, ‘There is an alternative. And it is, that in times of recession, government, by issuing bonds and taking the revenue from those bonds and spending those bonds to stimulate growth, putting money in workers’ hands, which was then spent in shops, which then encouraged businessmen to hire, which then encouraged investors to invest, could form a virtuous circle of co-operation between government and the economy in a way that would absolutely transform the extraordinary up and down rollercoaster ride that capitalism had been up until that point.’ And it is, of course, the world that we have by and large lived in. In a moment I’ll talk to you about what has been talked about as a transformation of that world in the last 30 years, and say something else to you about it through Galbraith’s eyes.

What you need to understand is that beginning in the 1930s, Americans, like citizens throughout the industrialised West, accepted the central responsibility of government for managing the economies in which they lived, not just to maintain the macro levels of production that led towards full employment, but also to provide for minimal, in fact significant networks, of social justice and social capital that left the entire society better off than it had been, despite all the errors, all the wastage and all the malfeasance that does go on in the public sector.

Galbraith, learning that lesson from Keynes, was hired at the beginning of the Second World War for an extraordinary job by Franklin Roosevelt. "At the age of 32, he became the prize czar of the American economy."At the age of 32, he became the prize czar of the American economy. That is, he was put in charge at that age, of making sure than when America went to war, that inflation did not break out and cripple the economy as extraordinary demands were placed upon it for men and materiel that would surely tax an economy that had been languishing for more than a decade. And you know what? He did a terrific job. In the First World War, prices had soared in little more than two years by more than 80%; in the Second World War, under this brash 32-year-old from Harvard, from a one-room schoolhouse in rural Ontario, prices rose roughly 5% over the course of the war.

It was a singular achievement. Now it wasn’t surely Keynesian in character, but it was another signal moment for Galbraith to learn what the appropriate relationship of government and the economy could be, in producing successful prosperity for all. But it also taught him something about power again. He says that as the Office of Price Administration where he worked, because they were placing price controls on goods and services that could be charged, in the United States there was an endless stream of CEOs and lobbyists and Congressmen willing to do the bidding of the lobbyists and the CEOs. And in these meetings which took place regularly at his offices on an almost daily basis, these gentlemen would troop in and begin to make their case, and in the middle of the meeting, as he would look around his fellow OPA officials would start to wiggle their fingers like this at one another, dead serious, as they listened to the petitions but quietly wiggling their fingers. And I said, ‘Well Professor Galbraith, what was that all about?’ He said, ‘Don’t you know the story of the ant colony?’ And I said, ‘No’. He said, ‘Well one day, a very hungry ant colony made a major discovery: an enormous pile of horse manure up the hill from the colony. And the queen ant sent her troops out to bring this large pile of manure back to the colony for provisioning. But as they manoeuvred it down the hill, it began to roll on its on, and grew faster and faster until there was an avalanche of horse manure about to pour down upon the ant colony, and the queen’s antennae went out like this.’ And Galbraith said, ‘You know what that means in ant language, don’t you? Stop that horseshit.’

You mustn’t however understand that Galbraith is simply anti-business, or even anti-big business. One of the significant contributions that he made to American liberalism in the mid-20th century was to help it reconcile itself intellectually to the idea of scale in American business. "One of the significant contributions that he made to American liberalism was to help it reconcile itself to the idea of scale in American business."He in fact has long believed that there is a useful role for large firms to play, because they have much longer planning horizons, they have the ability to finance R&D, they have the wealth and the market influence to provide well for their employees, compared to oftentimes what little can be provided by small and struggling business. But Galbraith also saw something remarkable happening in the 1950s as a result of the success of American business, not least American large business, in the post-war period, and it became as I’m sure many of you know, the subject of his great book, ‘The Affluent Society’. And what it was, in a sense, was the taking up of a projection that John Maynard Keynes himself had made in the early 1930s in which he foresaw the capacity of capitalism to overcome the fundamental issue of human want. That is, by the middle of the 20th century the United States stood in a remarkable place in human history. For the first time, a significantly large society was composed of a majority of men and women and children who were not poor. We sometimes forget, in fact we often forget, how absolutely new that is in terms of human history. And for Galbraith it presented, in typically Galbraithian understanding, both an opportunity and a peril. The opportunity of course was that with affluence we could free ourselves, as Keynes had hoped would become the case, from the strictures of labour and production for the sake of production, that we could go on to become human beings who became part of a human society that lived for more than material goods, and material ends.

But there was also of course this enormous risk, which was that the systematic brilliance of the large American corporation, in mastering the production process and in mastering the technology of the production of goods, found itself needing advertising and branding and all the other characteristics of a modern, wants-driven society, ultimately treating the consumer not as the opposite side of a supply demand relationship, but as the final leg in the production cycle, that is, the consumer needed to be managed to understand that he or she needed what the corporations produced, as surely as workers on the line or middle-manager supervising workers, were managed and ordered to optimise their work as well too. We in fact become one gigantic and endless chain of production in which the consumers’ consumption is simply a precondition for the production of more.
"The real needs of American society moving forward from the 1950s were not for more things to be privately consumed, but the construction of a public world that worked for all."
Now Galbraith mocked the qualities of a society that misunderstood that the real needs of American society moving forward from the 1950s, were not for bigger cars, not for bigger homes, not for more things to be privately consumed, but the construction of a public world that worked for all. A public world of public goods, of hospitals and medical systems that worked for all, of parks and recreation that were provided for all, not just education but first-rate, absolutely excellent education provided for all. These were the things that an affluent society owed itself, not more tail-fin automobiles, not the latest in avocado-trimmed refrigerators, or burnt-orange shag runs as many of you old enough to remember the ‘50s will recall. He of course was not then writing in a period when what I find to be the most striking metaphor of this new world, had emerged. Today though, he finds it as amusing as I do, that we walk down the streets of America and encounter so many people with the same name: Calvin, Harry, Tommy Hilfinger. I had no idea there were so many Hilfingers living in the United States today. What an enormous migration of people this must have been.

Here we are, as Americans, paying premium prices above the cost of the goods or the service that those goods provide, in order to serve as billboards for a corporation. Galbraith didn’t see this in the 1950s, but he cannot ignore it today. Now the other thing that Galbraith saw, is the growth in the 1950s of the American military. Galbraith has always understood, because he grew up in a period in American life before the Second World War, in which we had no tradition of a large, standing, military force. You have to recall that in 1940, General Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff, went before President Roosevelt and told him that the United States Army, if war came, would be able to field perhaps 125,000 or 135,000 armed troops. The United States Army Air Corps at that time was still flying substantial numbers of biplanes, as part of the defence of America. But after the Second World War, under the pressure of the Cold War, expenditure on the military grew, grew so enormous in fact, that half of all Federal spending was for the Department of Defense. And it is of course, kept going. As some of you may know, the Brookings Institution actually did a retrospective study of spending by the United States on military weaponry, and on the military, and concluded that in current dollar terms, the United States since the Second World War has spent roughly $24-trillion on the military, with roughly one-third of that alone going just for nuclear weapons.

Galbraith asks, what could we have done with $24-trillion? What different kind of society could we have been, what role could we have played in the world had those resources been freed up for other purposes?

The question that that raised in his mind then became central to the role he played in the Kennedy Administration, because as you know, he was President Kennedy’s Ambassador to India, but also close friend and confidante. And there’s a remarkable set of letters that goes back in those Kennedy Administration years between the President and his Ambassador, that make for remarkable reading. What they are, are a record of an Administration struggling not to go into Vietnam. Many of us long ago concluded that the Kennedy Administration, the Johnson Administration, and the Nixon Administration, was all one continuum. What we now know from declassified material, material that’s in the book, is that contrary to the idea that Kennedy wanted to go into Vietnam, Kennedy, acting largely under advice from Ambassador Galbraith, was doing his utmost throughout his Administration, to keep us out. In November, 1961, Maxwell Taylor, Kennedy’s military advisor and Walt Rostow, who was then Deputy National Security Advisor, went out to Saigon. Both men were committed to US actually going into Vietnam, as were most of Kennedy’s senior advisors. And this is the tale. Which is that they prepared a report out of that November ’61 visit, that called upon the President to make the first significant contribution of US troops to Vietnam. But as Maxwell Taylor said in one of the recently-declassified records of conversations that he had with Secretary Macnamara and Secretary Ruskin, ‘General Taylor, we can’t move too quickly because the President is opposed’.

Kirsten Garrett: This is Background Briefing on ABC Radio National, and the speaker is Richard Parker, who teaches public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He’s just published an authorised biography of J.K. Galbraith. The book is called John Kenneth Galbraith: His life, his politics, his economics. And today’s program is an edited version of a talk given at the Commonwealth Club some weeks ago.

Richard Parker: Now at the very moment that those two men returned from Saigon and prepared to present this report to President Kennedy and ask him to make a National Security finding that the United States had a significant national interest in Vietnam and should therefore introduce troops, John Kennedy Galbraith arrived back from New Delhi with Prime Minister Nehru on a State visit, and got wind of what was going on. He’d known Walt Rostow for 20 years and he’d not trusted Walt Rostow and he didn’t like Walt Rostow sitting that close to the President, but there it was, and so one had to do something about this rather than give up, or cavil or wring one’s hands.

So immediately after the first meeting at the White House between President Kennedy and Prime Minister Nehru, Ambassador Galbraith simply walked over to Walt Rostow’s office and said, ‘Walt, how are things going? I’d like to see a copy of the Taylor Report.’ And Rostow was horrified, he said, ‘Ken, this is eyes-only for the President of the United States, top secret, you can’t take a look at this report.’ Ken said, ‘That’s nonsense Walt, I have the same security clearance as a senior US Ambassador that you have as a National Security Advisor. I want to see the report.’ Rostow said no. And at that very moment, the phone rang in Rostow’s office, and Rostow turned backward to answer the phone, and as he did, Galbraith, sitting on the opposite side of Rostow’s desk, realised that the Taylor Commission report was sitting on the desk between the two men. Galbraith, 6-feet-8, leans forward, picks up the report, stands and walks out of Rostow’s office and the White House.

Now you can imagine what must have gone through Rostow’s mind at that moment, but of course there was no way to send the Secret Service out to stop him, the press office was two doors down. And the headline in the next day’s New York Times would have been ‘United States Ambassador arrested leaving White House with top secret documents’. This was not something that Walt Rostow wanted the Kennedy Administration to have any part in.

Well of course what Galbraith does is read this document, realise what Kennedy’s advisors are trying to get the President to do, and begins what amounts to a two-week long struggle to get the President not to follow the advisors’ advice. In details which are described in the book, there is a back-and-forth over the next two weeks, as the two sides contend. Galbraith, almost alone against the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, the Deputy National Security Advisor, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the President’s personal military advisor. Now the remarkable thing is that Kennedy is on Galbraith’s side. But when Galbraith and Kennedy start leaking to the press the dangers of this report, there is no outcry. This is November, 1961. There was no outcry in Congress, there was no outcry from the public, there was no outcry in the press about the dangers of the United States going into this kind of foreign war without solid foundations that could explain its purposes to the American people and to the world at large. And in the now-recovered minutes of the National Security Council meeting in which the advisors tried to press Kennedy forward, these minutes were lost for 25 years afterwards, because they were the personal minutes of General Lyman Lemnitzer, the Chief of Staff, and the Pentagon papers never saw them, they only came to light a few years ago after Lemnitzer died. There’s a remarkable record. Each of the advisors presents the case for going in, and the President sits silent. Half-way through the two-hour meeting, you see the notes by Lemnitzer saying ‘Attorney-General’ meaning Bobby Kennedy, the words are ‘Don’t you hear? No troops, no way, no fucking troops’. And President says at the end that his criteria for the commitment of American troops abroad to conflict are fourfold. The first is that there must be a clear rationale for their commitment that involves a direct threat to the United States and its citizens themselves. Second, that the United States should commit those troops only following the resolution of the Security Council authorising those troops, just as the United States had done in the Korean War. Third, that the troops would be sent only as part of a multilateral force, not American troops alone, because without the commitment of one’s allies, America would not stay the course. Finally, that the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of Defense owe the White House an exit strategy before we entered.

Now I would submit to you that there is relevance in those words by President Kennedy from November, 1961 to the situation in which we find ourselves today. Because that was the advice that he was hearing from Ambassador Galbraith, and Ambassador Galbraith, because of his particular understanding of power and politics and economics, knew that the issue was not simply the danger of Vietnam as a foreign misadventure. It was also that the Vietnam War would ultimately lead to an over-commitment of US troops that would ultimately endanger the United States economy by kicking off inflation and the very kinds of conditions that he had been able to prevent in the Second World War but that we couldn’t prevent with no declared state of war; that the failure of the economy and the failure of the war would risk tipping over not just the Kennedy Administration, but American liberalism, and the Keynesian economic experiment all at once. And ten years after Kennedy told his advisors what he wanted, Richard Nixon was in the White House. And Richard Nixon declared himself publicly to be a Keynesian. And as Galbraith said, ‘At that moment, I knew we had lost’.
"Richard Nixon had worked for Ken Galbraith as a young lawyer during the Second World War, a fact that Nixon had omitted from his resume for the next 35 years."
As he once told a reporter in the early 1970s, Galbraith had a very vivid view of Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon had worked for Ken Galbraith as a young lawyer during the Second World War, a fact that Nixon had omitted from his resume for the next 35 years, that he only admitted to when The New York Times found out about it and published the information. But in the early 1970s there was a world wide food shortage, and as you will recall, Nixon started secretly selling wheat to the Russians. As part of the question that was at hand, the open issue was, ‘Was there something to do with climate that might be causing this world wide food shortage’ And a brave young New York Times reporter went to Professor Galbraith at Harvard, and asked Professor Galbraith, Do you think that climate somehow explains the problems we’re having in this situation? And Galbraith pulled himself up to his full height and he said, ‘Young man, never blame the deity for anything as long as Richard Nixon is in the White House.’

That understanding would carry Galbraith forward over the next 30 years, as you understand the kind of liberalism and the kind of Keynesianism that John Kenneth Galbraith represented have been in abeyance these last 30 years. But it’s also important to understand what Galbraith’s critique of these last 30 years have been. Which is that we are not faced with a Republican party of the kind that Galbraith grew up quite familiar with. This is not, despite its claims, a party of small government. This is a big government Republican party. As Galbraith points out, right now under George W. Bush the United States government is larger as a percentage of Gross National Product than it ever was under Lyndon Johnson, ever was under John F. Kennedy, ever was under Franklin Roosevelt in the Depression. The only time government has taken a greater share of GDP was in the Second World War when the purposes for that spending seemed clear. This is not a Republican party that is in fact, despite its protestations, a party of fiscal responsibility. Since 1980 nearly $7-trillion have been added to the US public debt. This year we will add another $500-billion. Next year, another $500-billion.

We are caught right now in a topsy-turvy world in which Galbraith believes we are seeing a kind of Utopian radical Republicanism that in some sense is the dark mirror of the excesses of the Utopian lefts of the 1960s. And that it’s the responsibility of American liberals and American moderates to serve as a pragmatic centre to bring the country back in line with its traditional values when it is this Republican party that is in the name of traditional values, overthrowing every one of them at every turn.

Ken Galbraith at 96, continues to write, continues to fight. President Clinton came to see him three weeks ago at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some of you may know that President Clinton gave Professor Galbraith the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honour. What you may not know is that Professor Galbraith is one of only two Americans ever to receive that award twice. It was given to him by Harry Truman in 1946. Bill Clinton, as he left office, began writing Professor Galbraith, proposing that the two of them write a book on the future of American government. Ultimately, Professor Galbraith declined because of age and health, and because although he won’t say this directly, because I think they might have disagreed.

What I can tell you is that there was a wonderful moment in the hour-long discussion at Professor Galbraith’s home, when as only he could, he turned to Bill Clinton and said, ‘As I told Harry Truman, this country doesn’t need two Republican parties.’

The legacy of John Kenneth Galbraith is not simply intellectual, it’s not simply in terms of his public service, this is a man who has been rewarded well, over his life. Academically, he served 42 years as a Professor at Harvard University, his books have sold more than 8-million copies, he’s the recipient of 52 honorary PhDs from Oxford, from Harvard, from the Sorbonne, from the LSE, from the University of California. He has been well honoured in his life. The honour that I suggest that we owe him, is the honour we owe ourselves: To understand what his career has been about. It has been about commitment, it has been about conscience and it has been about courage. These are traditional American values, and American liberals like Ken Galbraith have a noble history of nurturing and preserving and advancing them and we ought to do likewise.

Thank you.

APPLAUSE

Chairman: Well, our thanks to Richard Parker, Senior Fellow at Shorenstein Center at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, author of John Kenneth Galbraith: His life, his politics, his economics for joining us. And now this meeting of the Commonwealth Club of California, commemorating over a century of enlightened discussion, is adjourned.

GAVEL/APPLAUSE

Kirsten Garrett: But stay with Background Briefing, because Galbraith himself was interviewed by Phillip Adams on Radio National’s Late Night Live program in 2002. He was then 93. Phillip Adams talked to Galbraith at his home in Boston, and here has asked him if at such an age, and with so many of his contemporaries gone, if Galbraith sometimes felt lonely.

Kenneth Galbraith: No, not at all. I have lost a lot of my wartime contemporaries, but teaching at Harvard, you have a new generation coming along and my son James Kenneth Galbraith, is a Professor at the University of Texas, and he in turn has a wide range of acquaintances, many of whom I’ve come to know, and the result is that while I miss the people with whom I was once associated, quite a few of my old associates are indeed still alive, and as I say, there’s a very interesting younger generation that becomes available through the University, and through life generally.

Phillip Adams: I know I’m not allowed to all Harvard a campus, I’ve got to call Harvard a yard, and on this yard, or in this yard, do you find many new generation scholars, academics, who are sympathetic to your view of economics, to the Keynesian view, to the idea of social justice and some vestige of a Welfare State?

Kenneth Galbraith: Oh sure. There’s no inter-generational difference there. I have a group of younger friends on the Harvard faculty who are just as vigorously in pursuit of social justice as I ever was. And for whom Keynes, and the support role of aggregate demand and the role of the State is different certainly in detail and in refinement, but not different in view from my own. I would say we have the same distribution as between conservatives and liberals, as between those who see a larger role for the State and those who see a smaller one. For those who are committed to classical theory and its mathematical formulations, it lends itself to mathematics, and others, that’s been about the same in my whole lifetime.

Kirsten Garrett: J.K. Galbraith is talking to Phillip Adams in 2002. The discussion which lasted for nearly an hour, ranged over 50 years of modern history, including the Second World War, and Galbraith’s views of the many Presidents whose terms in the White House he has observed. Phillip Adams.

Phillip Adams: Years ago, I read a very fine book on American politics, called ‘Nixon Agonistes’ by Gary Wills of Chicago. For the first time, I heard someone say something good about the Eisenhower presidency. He regarded Eisenhower as a very successful President, pointing out, for example, that on his term of duty, no American was killed in a war. You also speak kindly of Eisenhower.

Kenneth Galbraith: I say that Eisenhower is by many of my liberal colleagues, underestimated. Roosevelt invented the welfare system, social security, responsibility of the State for the poor, the whole sense of community responsibility. And I came along afterward and accepted it. Roosevelt innovated, Truman continued and Eisenhower confirmed. Then there was one other thing: Eisenhower came into office with a miserable war on his hands in Korea. Truman had been unwilling to negotiate an end to the war, and Ike went to Korea, as he said he would in the election, and negotiated an end to the war. Eisenhower, along with other things, got an end to a bloody, cruel conflict that needed very much to be brought to an end.

Phillip Adams: He’s also responsible for identifying to your country and to the world, the dangers of what he described as ‘the military-industrial complex’.

Kenneth Galbraith: This is right. These were his last words in office that the country faced a very great danger of the unity of military and private power, corporate power, and gave us the world ‘the military-industrial complex’, the phrase. This was very important and very real, because we did face that and we have since.

Phillip Adams: Yes, it’s still a factor of course, isn’t it. When we walked into this beautiful room, with a shelf full of leather-bound versions of your editions of your books, or some of them at least, you indicated that your best book, your favourite book, was on the top shelf. And I looked around and couldn’t find one of the famous titles at all. What I finally found was a book on Indian art, a book on Indian miniatures. ‘This is my best book’, you said. Why?

Kenneth Galbraith: Well that’s perhaps an exaggeration. My best book was ‘New Industrial State’ and ‘The Affluent Society’; those two books I cherish. "We must not measure human achievement by economic production, by the Gross National Product."But there’s a point here, and let’s keep it in mind. We must not measure human achievement by economic production, by the Gross National Product. When Spring comes, as we’re taught, and people head out of the United States for Italy, for Florence, it was not their high Gross National Product that attracted them. And let us bear in mind that William Shakespeare was the product of a country with a very low Gross National Product or Gross Domestic Product. Let us realise that there are achievements, very great achievements that are outside of the field of economics. Let us bear in mind that Darwin, who had an enormous effect on all social thought, was not equipped with a large remunerative staff. We have a large range of artistic and scientific achievement which still depends on separate human intelligence.

Phillip Adams: Look, this is a question I ask every guest at one point or another in our chats. You’re in your 90s, do you fear death?

Kenneth Galbraith: Oh, I contemplate it occasionally, but I’m not going to allow fear of death to interfere with my few remaining months and years of life. If I contemplated that, I would destroy my enjoyment of what I have.

Phillip Adams: And you clearly enjoy life enormously.

Kenneth Galbraith: Oh I’ve enjoyed life almost without exception.

Kirsten Garrett: John Kenneth Galbraith will be 97 later this year, and is still an Emeritus Professor at Harvard. The new biography of him by Richard Parker took eight years to write. Kirsten Garrett: Richard Parker. The biography is called John Kenneth Galbraith: His life, his politics, his economics. The publisher is Farrar Straus and Girroux.

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