Free Republic

A Canadian university recently asked me to deliver its annual John Kenneth Galbraith Lecture, named for the economist who for much of my youth was the most famous member of his profession in the world. His books sold by the million and were available everywhere in cheap paperback editions; titles such as American Capitalism and The Affluent Society were known to almost all educated people. A teacher at Princeton, Cambridge, and Harvard, he was the editor for a time of Fortune and the American ambassador to India. He was also the first economist to be widely known on television, not...

James Galbraith: No V-Shaped Recovery -VIDEO-

Yesterday the New York Times reported the Norwegian financial newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv’s revelations that Peter Galbraith, a former US diplomat and advisor to the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq, stands to make hundreds of millions of dollars in profit from Iraqi oil revenues. Galbraith’s profits would result from his cashing in on his links to the Kurdish regional leadership, and his role in drafting Iraq’s Constitution, shortly after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. In 2004, Galbraith helped the Kurds arrange deals with Norwegian oil firm DNO and prepare for negotiations on the Iraqi Constitution, including controversial provisions on...

http://dailybail.com/home/must-see-bank-bailout-news-james-galbraith-says-geithner-ban.html We think Geithner is suffering from five fundamental misconceptions about what is wrong with the economy. Here they are: The trouble with the economy is that the banks aren't lending. The reality: The economy is in trouble because American consumers and businesses took on way too much debt and are now collapsing under the weight of it. As consumers retrench, companies that sell to them are retrenching, thus exacerbating the problem. The banks, meanwhile, are lending. They just aren't lending as much as they used to. Also the shadow banking system (securitization markets), which actually provided more funding to...

Many years ago, when I was a college student, I took a course from John Kenneth Galbraith. On the first day of class, Professor Galbraith gave a brilliant opening lecture, after which the students gave him a standing ovation. Galbraith kept on giving brilliant opening lectures the whole semester. But, instead of standing ovations, there were now dwindling numbers of students and some of them got up and walked out in the middle of his lectures. Galbraith never got beyond the glittering generalities that marked his first lecture. After a while, the students got tired of not getting any real...

24 June 2008 Zagreb _ A former US ambassador to Croatia has accused Zagreb of plotting and sanctioning the exodus of Serbs in 1995 to create an "ethnically clean" country. Peter Galbraith told The Hague war crimes trial of three Croatian generals, that the leadership headed by late President Franjo Tudjman used ‘Operation Storm’ to ‘cleanse’ Croatia of Serbs. “Croatian authorities either ordered or allowed a mass destruction of the Serb property in former (Serb-held region of) Krajina to prevent the return of the population. I consider that to have been a thought through policy,” he said, testifying at the...

With its attacks on advertising, opulence and environmental filth, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, published 50 years ago, anticipated today’s small-minded growth scepticism. It has become so much part of conventional wisdom that affluence is a problem that it is hard to imagine that attitudes were ever different. The media is full of stories about problems that allegedly owe much to our affluent lifestyles, including environmental degradation, social inequalities and even mental illness. Yet there was once a time when popular prosperity was seen as overwhelmingly positive. When John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society was first published 50 years...

"In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong." John Kenneth Galbraith, who died at the age of 97 on April 29, said that to Britain's Guardian newspaper in 1989. Was any American economist of comparable esteem so wrong -- so comfortably and contentedly wrong, and for so many years -- as Galbraith himself? Verily, I cannot think of a rival. Galbraith, let me say, was a brilliant public intellectual; an elegant (if tending to the orotund) writer; a remarkably accomplished and productive...

John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist who died last week in his 98th year, has been justly celebrated for his wit, fluency, public-spiritedness and public service, which extended from New Deal Washington to India, where he served as U.S. ambassador. Like two Harvard colleagues -- historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Sen. Pat Moynihan, another ambassador to India -- Galbraith was among liberalism's leading public intellectuals, yet he was a friend and skiing partner of William F. Buckley. After one slalom down a Swiss mountain, inelegantly executed by the 6-foot-8-inch Galbraith, Buckley asked how long Galbraith had been skiing. Thirty years,...

The public Galbraith I knew and contended with for many years is captured in the opening paragraphs of my review of his last book, "The Culture of Contentment." I wrote then: ` "It is fortunate for Professor Galbraith that he was born with singular gifts as a writer. It is a pity he hasn't used these skills in other ways than to try year after year to bail out his sinking ships. Granted, one can take satisfaction from his anti-historical exertions, and wholesome pleasure from his yeomanry as a sump-pumper. Indeed, his rhythm and grace recall the skills we remember...

Had it not been for the accident of his birth in Iona Station, Ontario, John Kenneth Galbraith, the greatest public intellectual of the second half of the American 20th century, would surely have been considered presidential timber. As it was, the man whose Canadian birth barred him from seeking the nation's highest office had to settle for shaping every presidency since that of Franklin Roosevelt either as a trusted counselor to the occupant of the Oval Office, a wise critic or, as was frequently the case, both. One of the last veterans of the Roosevelt epic's first term during which...

Reason Foundation    free minds and free markets May 1, 2006 American Scold Galbraith invented a modern archetype Jeff A. Taylor It is tempting to string together a series of glib declarations from John Kenneth Galbraith's 50 years in public life, note their absurdities, and move on. That would be wrong on two counts. For one, five decades of wonkish fame buys you some wiggle room. And two, it would miss just how successful and influential Galbraith, the Canadian-born Harvard economist who influenced U.S. economic thinking for more than 60 years, was in defining the terms and style of debate on...

John Kenneth Galbraith, the iconoclastic economist, teacher and diplomat and an unapologetically liberal member of the political and academic establishment he often needled in prolific writings for more than half a century, died yesterday at a hospital in Cambridge, Mass. He was 97. Mr. Galbraith lived in Cambridge and at an "unfarmed farm" near Newfane, Vt. His death was confirmed by his son J. Alan Galbraith. Mr. Galbraith was one of the most widely read authors in the history of economics; among his 33 books was "The Affluent Society" (1958), one of those rare works that forces a nation to...

"With the rise of the modern corporation, the emergence of the organization required by modern technology and planning and the divorce of the owner of capital from control of the enterprise, the entrepreneur no longer exists in the mature industrial enterprise." -- John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, chapter vi The role of entrepreneurs is one of those issues that divides people politically. If you value entrepreneurship, then it is difficult to be a statist. If you are a statist, then it is difficult to value entrepreneurship. John Kenneth Galbraith represents the quintessential statist. If we were literally stuck...

President Bush doesn't lack for critics when it comes to his Iraq policies, but the smartest and most devastating of these is Peter W. Galbraith, a former United States ambassador to Croatia. Yesterday, after reading a morning's worth of gloomy press accounts about the proposed Iraqi constitution, I thought it might be interesting to hear what Galbraith himself had to say. I finally tracked him down in Baghdad (at God knows what hour there) and found that far from lambasting Bush, Galbraith was more complimentary about what the administration has just achieved than anybody else I spoke to all day....

August 6 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the devastating atomic bomb attack against the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. For the most part, up until the 1960s the predominant view was that the U.S. was justified in its decision to use nuclear weapons against the Japanese. There was a general consensus to accept, at face value, that American leaders had determined that Japan would not surrender, and that their determination to fight to the death against an invasion would have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands,...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version March 04, 2005, 1:22 p.m. Galbraith Up CloseHis life, his politics, his economics. Professor John Kenneth Galbraith leans back on his chaise longue and answers the question about the book: “I think it’s fine. I couldn’t have done it better if I had written it myself.” The reference is to John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics, by Richard Parker. “Did you read it?” “Yes.” “The whole thing? I bet you didn’t.” But his visitor had read it all, 800 pages, pronouncing it...

Richard Parker's February 6th Boston Globe article "The Pragmatist and the Utopian" is an interesting comparison between legendary economists John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman. In the article, Parker gives a long history of what he sees as the relationship between Friedman, his ideas and the conservative wing of the Republican Party. (To be fair, it's not clear whether the article's claims come directly from Parker, or from conversation(s) with Galbraith that are then related in the article). According to his reading of history, Parker wants his readers to believe that Friedman is a dangerous utopian, while Galbraith is a...

In 1984, as all devoted readers of Conversations with Trentino know, John Kenneth Galbraith visited the Soviet Union and praised it for the prosperity he saw in its "exfoliating apartment houses" well stocked stores, and traffic-filled streets. Professor Galbraith took particular note of labor efficiency: he observed that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics used its manpower efficiently, unlike the US. Galbraith was then the grand panjandrum of economics, a professor of that dark science at Harvard, erstwhile president of the American Economic Association, a founding member of the ADA, and formerly US Ambassador to India. A card-carrying liberal in...

FANTASY has caught on in this presidential election season. We are told that presidents do not matter much to the course of the economy. But a brief tour of history starkly suggests the opposite. In fact, every president at least since John F. Kennedy significantly influenced the course of the economy, even in the short run. How did this improbable idea of presidential impotence catch on with economists and political analysts? Most likely the main reason is that fiscal policy - more government spending or lower taxes - is widely thought to be less powerful than monetary policy. The president...

No one can say precisely when the Culture War started nor, indeed, exactly what it is, but roughly it is: A contest between Left and Right for the cultural high ground begun about two hundred years ago, sparked by the French Revolution and given grim impetus by Karl Marx and his successors. For much of the twentieth century,the Left appeared to be winning all the battles. The Left was joyous and triumphant. The Right persisted, but the myths of the merits of socialism as benefactor of the poor and oppressed, deliverer of peace and prosperity, nurturer of liberty, fraternity, and...

<p>RELATED STORIES • Fletcher leads for governor • How the poll was conducted • Top Democrats chide local GOP • Poll results Democrat Greg Stumbo continues to lead in the three-way race for attorney general, while the state auditor's race remains a virtual tie, according to The Courier-Journal's latest Bluegrass Poll.</p>

NEW YORK - Besieged by claims resulting from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, dozens of insurance companies filed lawsuits Wednesday seeking $300 billion in damages from terrorist groups and companies and countries accused of supporting terrorism. In the two lawsuits, filed in New York and Washington, D.C., the companies sought to recover money paid out, or set aside to be paid, as a result of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. The lawsuits maintain the companies are entitled to collect damages and recover claims under multiple federal laws. The defendants include the organizations al-Qaida, Egyptian Islamic Jihad and...

How we trained al-Qa’eda Brendan O’Neill says the Bosnian war taught Islamic terrorists to operate abroad For all the millions of words written about al-Qa’eda since the 9/11 attacks two years ago, one phenomenon is consistently overlooked — the role of the Bosnian war in transforming the mujahedin of the 1980s into the roving Islamic terrorists of today. Many writers and reporters have traced al-Qa’eda and other terror groups’ origins back to the Afghan war of 1979–1992, that last gasp of the Cold War when US-backed mujahedin forces fought against the invading Soviet army. It is well documented that America...

Galbraith aims to enter attorney general's race -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By DEBORAH YETTER dyetter@courier-journal.com The Courier-Journal Voters seeking another option in the race for Kentucky attorney general appear to have one. Gatewood Galbraith — Lexington lawyer, marijuana advocate and three-time unsuccessful candidate for governor — filed yesterday to run as an independent candidate and said he expects to have no trouble getting the 5,000 signatures needed to get on the November ballot. Galbraith, 56, said yesterday he believes he offers a refreshing alternative to the party candidates Democrat Greg Stumbo, who faces various allegations about his personal life, and Republican Jack D....

For those of you who don't have the time or the inclination to read Mona Charen's excellent book, Useful Idiots, yes, the book I recommended to you in this space a couple of weeks ago, you can take the short course: read Arnold Beichman's succinct essay on the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Josef Vissarionovich Stalin. Mr. Beichman covers those useful idiots who could not or would not see the enormity of the famine deliberately caused in the Soviet Union in 1932-1933, somewhere around 5,000,000 lives. Walter Duranty reported it falsely to his useful idiot bosses at the New...

Although the Left regarded socialism as the answer to the cries of the prisoners of starvation, Lefties were aware that there was something wrong with socialist productivity. Goods were scarce, sacrifices had to be made to assure a better, more abundant future. That, anyway, was how it was explained. But facts are stubborn things, as you know, and they kept seeping out. They had started seeping out soon after Lenin took charge...more