Working the Dead Beat (5 page)

John Kenneth Galbraith

Economist

October 15, 1908 – April 29, 2006

T
HE MOST POPULAR
American economist of the past century was actually a Canadian.

John Kenneth Galbraith, the lanky six-foot, eight-inch Keynesian pundit and advisor to Democratic presidents — from Roosevelt through Clinton — was born on a farm in southwestern Ontario when Laurier was prime minister and Canada was still part of the British Empire.

In the academic discipline known as the dismal science, Galbraith was in the troika of our most internationally celebrated practitioners. The other two are economic historian Harold Innis (whose work, and whose influence on other academics such as Marshall McLuhan, is still internationally revered) and political economist Stephen Leacock, who is remembered today chiefly as a writer and humorist. Galbraith, as political scientist Stephen Clarkson once quipped, was “Canada's greatest contribution to civilizing American capitalism.”

He learned his populist politics on his father's farm before the First World War and discovered his inherent writing skills at the Ontario College of Agriculture during the Depression. As for his mordant wit, charisma, and social cachet, they seemed to come naturally. An economic and political confidant of President John F. Kennedy, he contributed the pivotal sentence “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate” to Kennedy's inauguration speech.

He never won the Nobel Prize, nor did he spawn any schools of economic thought — as did his arch-rival, Milton Friedman. Still, Galbraith wrote more than forty books, many of them bestsellers; coined the expressions
conventional wisdom
,
affluent society
, and
countervailing powers
; and was said to have been the only economist invited to Truman Capote's Black and White Ball in New York in 1966.

He was awarded the Order of Canada, nearly fifty honorary degrees, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice — by Harry S. Truman in 1948 and Bill Clinton in 2000. His books include
American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power
(1952),
The Affluent Society
(1958),
The New Industrial State
(1967),
The Age of Uncertainty
(1977), and three satirical novels.

Galbraith taught at Harvard for more than thirty years, but he wasn't a typical academic. He used his wit and his flair for the well-honed phrase to write for a popular market rather than a scholarly one, rarely presenting his ideas in peer-reviewed scholarly papers where they could be vetted by the profession. Many economists resented him for hanging out in presidential enclaves and op-ed pages instead of sticking to the seminar rooms and the lecture halls, but Galbraith, who was never criticized for being excessively modest, was unchastened.

He had learned early on — working in the Office of Price Administration for the Roosevelt administration during the Second World War — that nobody paid any attention to dense academic arguments, so he deliberately wrote for the general public about economic issues, gambling that when an idea caught on with the masses, the profession would pay attention too. And that's exactly what happened As his friend the economist Paul Samuelson observed to Galbraith's biographer Richard Parker, he “will be remembered, and read when most of us Nobel Laureates will be buried in footnotes down in dusty library stacks.”

Galbraith was so popular with the public and so prominently connected with government leaders that the profession couldn't disregard him: they elected him president of the American Economic Association in 1972. True to his Canadian roots, he insisted that the association's annual meeting be held in Toronto, the first time it had ever met outside the United States.

As a populist, he contended that economics had failed as a field of study by pr
etending to be something it wasn't — a hard science. As for economists, they had lost touch with the way economies actually operate in relation to political, social, and environmental factors by adhering like barnacles to mathematical modelling. “In making economics a non-political subject,” Galbraith once wrote, “neoclassical theory destroys the relation of economics to the real world . . . it manipulates levers to which no machinery is attached.”

Economist Richard Parker described the Galbraithian method, in
John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics
, as dealing with issues as they emerge. “You don't proceed from an abstract, atemporal, ageographical model, but from what you see around you and what you can feel around you,” Parker explained in a public lecture.

Today Galbraith's reputation rests on his talents as a writer of masterful prose, his historical influence as a presidential advisor, and his work as a pragmatic liberal economist who believed in government intervention as a countervailing economic force to unbridled capitalism. “I'm for a socially pain-free, decently egalitarian society,” he told the
Globe and Mail
in 2005, when he was ninety-six, still writing books and still in demand as a pundit.

JOHN KENNETH (KEN)
Galbraith was born on October 15, 1908, in the back bedroom of a two-storey farmhouse in Iona Station, a hamlet on the railway line connecting Detroit and Buffalo. He was the third of five children (although one sister had died of whooping cough before he was born) of schoolteacher and farmer William Archibald (Archie) Galbraith and his wife, Sarah Catherine (Kate) Galbraith (née Kendall).

His parents weren't rich but they weren't poor either, owning two farms that together amounted to 150 acres. Although the Galbraiths were staunchly Liberal in their politics, Archie Galbraith was sufficiently disgruntled to become active in the United Farmers of Ontario, a protest movement that gained enough political momentum to win the provincial election of 1919.

Many years later, Galbraith sardonically memorialized his family, which had emigrated from Scotland in 1819, in
The Scotch
, one of his most popular books. He recalled attending a political rally with his father in the middle of the First World War, when he was about eight. Needing a podium, the senior Galbraith mounted a large pile of manure and addressed the crowd. “He apologized with ill-concealed sincerity for speaking from the Tory platform,” Galbraith wrote. “The effect on this agrarian audience was electric. Afterward I congratulated him on the brilliance of the sally. He said, ‘It was good but it didn't change any votes.'”

His mother died after a short illness when he was fifteen, a tragedy that he mentioned briefly in his memoirs,
A Life in Our Times
, when he wrote: “My mother, a beautiful, affectionate and decidedly firm woman, died when her children — my brother, my two sisters, and I — were not yet all in their teens.” The family was devastated.

Her husband, Archie, remote in his grief, never remarried and became even more active in community affairs. As for Ken, an avid reader, he found solace in books, taking advantage of the local library's decision to change its lending policy from two books every two weeks to unlimited borrowing. Even so, he let his assigned schoolwork slump. He travelled the six miles to school in a horse and buggy with his siblings but was frequently late for class. Gangly, awkward at sports, and humiliated by his clumsiness in the compulsory cadet corps, he had to repeat his senior year of high school.

After he finally graduated in 1926, he went to the Ontario Agricultural College (now the University of Guelph), about eighty miles northeast of home, because his father decided he should. Years later, Galbraith referred to the
OAC
in an interview in
Time
magazine as “not only the cheapest but probably the worst college in the English-speaking world.”

He spent five years at the
OAC
partly because of his inadequate high school education and partly because he was diagnosed with “an incipient tuberculosis.” What made the difference for this decidedly indifferent student was the academic requirement that all students had to write weekly compositions. And this is where the physically inept but bright Galbraith came into his own.

Buoyed by his newly discovered aptitude for the written word, he helped to found a college newspaper, the
oacis
, which gave him a touch of campus celebrity and the nickname Spike, which he much preferred to his high school moniker, Soupy. He began freelancing and produced a few pieces on agricultural issues for local papers, the
St. Thomas Times-Journal
and the
Stratford Beacon Herald
. His earnings — five dollars per column — enabled him to go to the 1930 International Livestock Exhibition in Chicago, a trip he said later was “the greatest triumph of my college days.”

The Depression was eradicating farmers' hard-won prosperity. That economic reality, which Galbraith and his family were experiencing on a visceral level, led him to conclude that “something was terribly wrong with the way agricultural markets worked,” according to biographer Richard Parker. That problem, an opportunity to do something about it, and a potential direction for his own future coalesced when Galbraith spotted a poster advertising graduate fellowships in agricultural economics at the University of California.

He applied and was accepted. Late in July 1931, his father drove him to Port Stanley, where he boarded the Lake Erie steamer for its daily run to Cleveland and met up with the nephew of a family acquaintance. The two young men drove across the country in a gas-guzzling 1926 Oakland sedan to Berkeley, an academic institution that made more intellectual demands and offered greater opportunities than anything he had encountered at home.

When he was asked by the
Globe and Mail
why he stayed in the United States, rather than returning to Canada after graduating from Berkeley with his doctorate in agricultural economics in 1934, he replied: “I had a choice between Washington and Ottawa, and my hesitation was non-existent. I was personally invited by William Lyon Mackenzie King and the alternative was the Roosevelt administration and the New Deal. And I have no recollection of a problematical or passionate struggle over the choice.”

As a new graduate, he had a five-year teaching contract at Harvard University in Boston and summer jobs working for Roosevelt's Agricultural Adjustment Administration. In 1937 he married Catherine (Kitty) Atwater, a Radcliffe student and linguist, and became an American citizen — the U.S. didn't allow dual citizenship back then. The Galbraiths went to Europe on their honeymoon, where he hoped to meet with his hero John Maynard Keynes. That ambition was thwarted because Keynes, who would die a decade later, had suffered a heart attack.

When Galbraith's contract at Harvard expired, he taught at Princeton and then moved to Chicago to work in the U.S. Farm Bureau. Early in 1941, he became deputy administrator of the Office of Price Administration, responsible for setting U.S. prices to prevent wartime inflation and to encourage the production of military supplies. John S. Gambs, one of his early biographers, described Galbraith as “virtually the economic czar of the United States” he ran afoul of Republican congressman Everett Dirksen from Illinois. Accused of having “communistic tendencies,” Galbraith was fired in 1943.

With a wife and two small boys to support — the Galbraiths would eventually have four sons — he actively solicited an editorial position with
Fortune
magazine, having rejected job offers there three times in the past. Publisher Henry Luce, the genius who had invented
Time
,
Life
,
Fortune
, and
Sports Illustrated
, didn't share Galbraith's liberal economic and political views, but he recognized the value of having them expounded in his pages. Years later, Luce wrote to President John F. Kennedy, “I taught Kenneth Galbraith to write. And I can tell you I've certainly regretted it ever since.”

Galbraith worked at
Fortune
for five years, elucidating the tenets of Keynesian economics to American business leaders. He took a leave at the end of the Second World War, when he was seconded as one of several directors of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, to study the effectiveness of the Allied bombing of strategic and civilian German targets. He concluded that the carpet bombing of German cities had not hastened the end of the war, although the final reports of the survey were not as strongly worded as he would have liked.

With Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of the recent U.S. president, and Hubert Humphrey, he co-founded the liberal interest group Americans for Democratic Action in 1947. The following year he left
Fortune
and went back to teaching at Harvard, occupying the Paul M. Warburg Chair in Economics, a position he held until his retirement in 1975. His colleagues, perhaps with some envy, called him “the most famous professor at Harvard.”

By 1950 Galbraith had tenure and had signed a publishing contract for what would become his breakthrough book,
American Capitalism
. Success often beckons tragedy to test the mettle of a supposedly lucky individual, and so it was with Galbraith. That March his second son, six-year-old Douglas, was diagnosed with leukemia. For Kitty Galbraith, the horror of watching her son die was compounded by her mother's coincidental diagnosis with a brain tumour, tearing her from one bedside in Boston to another in New York City. Days after she returned from her mother's funeral, Dougie, as he was called, died, shortly after his seventh birthday. Biographer Parker writes that the child's grieving parents had given him the bicycle he had wanted for his birthday, all the while knowing he would never ride it.

American Capitalism
, which Galbraith dedicated to his dead son, was a bestseller in 1952 and is still in print more than half a century later. “Like a slingshot,
American Capitalism
propelled him beyond the gravitational pull of university life and professional economics,” according to Parker.
Business Week
was more explicit: “A brilliant and provocative book, witty, irreverent, and utterly merciless.”