The Age of Uncertainty, by John Kenneth Galbraith
Allen, William R.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "The Age of Uncertainty, by John Kenneth Galbraith" This is illustrated by the activities of the OSHA research department, NIOSH (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health). For bud-getary reasons, NIOSH "signed an...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 14,526...
...6. Names and complete addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor: Publisher: John A. Von Kannon, 102 West Sixth Street, Bloomington, Indiana 47401...
...C) Total paid circulation: average no...
...Finally, Galbraith is discouraging in the realm of policy prescription...
...4. Location of known office of publication: 102 West Sixth Street, Bloomington, Monroe County, Indiana 47401...
...Without better knowl-edge our intentions will lead to more government interference with the internal decisions of management...
...D) Free distribution by mail, carrier, or other means...
...actual no...
...Today blacks need job-training, an expand-ing economy, and as few regulations bar-ring individual industry as possible...
...In fact, my guess is that there are hundreds, perhaps thou-sands, of words whose meanings he has only the vaguest hold on, as is suggested by the following absurd harvest culled from his public bloviations: "I demoralize racism and call it ethnocentrism...
...America's newest, freshest celebrity," trumpeted New Times...
...Neither position is satisfactory...
...Eugene ("Bull") Connor...
...William R. Allen can effectively exposit the most useful thought available...
...There is nothing in this picture storybook that would tax the analytic powers of Jane Fonda...
...Whereupon Andy promptly ambushed himself...
...How are we to take the measure of a sophisticated book by a scholar...
...Liberals have little that is sensible to say about race, conservatives say nothing about race, and a pathetico like Andy is held up as wise and essential...
...Every civilized spectator has enjoyed this show, but not without a twinge of apprehension...
...For one thing, the line of causation—if any well-behaved relationship exists— between changing ideas and changing cir-cumstances might run in either direction or in both directions...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 17,281...
...Today the prospects for racial harmony are not sunny...
...2) Returns from news agents: average no...
...Still, this is not so much a product of the literary world as a product of show biz—and Galbraith clearly is a prospering superstar in pro-viding the conventional wisdom demanded by the show-biz crowd...
...The purported "basic theme" of The Age of Uncertainty is to "contrast the great certainties in economic thought in the last century with the great uncertainty with which problems are faced in our time...
...copies printed (net press run): average no...
...To reduce the costs of regulation, Weidenbaum proposes more imaginative ways of approaching . problems...
...Having earlier established that his experience in the South made him an expert on racism, he now declared that victims of racism are so traumatized by it that it deludes them...
...The chorus of nonsense that swelled up every time Andy flum-moxed the works remains a garish manifestation of the ritualistic liberals' uneasy acceptance of blacks, and an arresting illustration of their high moral commitment to a politics of sheer symbolism and empty gestures...
...And it is poetry—unstructured, unmetered blank verse—filled with literary grace notes in the form of sophomoric quips...
...He aims to explain the essence of world history— largely a story of capitalistic insensitivity and wickedness, abetted by classical economics—during the last two centuries...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 805...
...Normally, first-rate scholars do not bother to debunk simple foolishness...
...It is claimed at the outset that the strategy of the book is to study the influence of economic ideas on social actions and institutions: "First, Adam Smith, Ricardo and Malthus, then the impact of their systems...
...but if they were to read the encomiums pouring in from the liberal brethren, large numbers of them would be growing sideburns, reading French menus, and otherwise preparing for ca-reers in high public office...
...Last winter he had hardly delivered his first lecture against "knee-jerk anti-communism" or discovered his first racist under the bed, when ritualistic liberals began elbowing each other aside and issuing laudations to his eloquence and intelligence...
...This is neither scholarship nor the reporting and synthesizing of scholarship...
...Yet the ritualistic liberals whoop it up every time Andy abandons himself to an impulse increasingly pro-nounced amongst American public figures, to wit: the impulse to ham it up and make a hind of oneself...
...He lectured Americans for being "paranoid" about Communism in Africa...
...Proper identification and effective confrontation of vexing difficulties in this vale of tears are not likely to be advanced by such posturings of moral and intellectual superiority...
...A. You got me there...
...Instead, it is seemingly implied that quite satisfactory resolution of our most pressing problems requires little more than Gal-braithian sensitivity and purity—or, in-deed, little more than the instinct of the race...
...And when the productivity of business declines as it tries to cope with misguided, excessive regula-tion, the desirable aims of sound regula-tion become that much harder to realize...
...B) Paid circulation: (1) Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales: average no...
...For completion by publishers mailing at the regular rates (Section 132.121, Postal Service Manual): 39 U.S.C...
...Many of the passing comments are hit-and-run, bush league, cheap shots...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 300...
...with respect to the British-produced TV series from which this book is chopped, he speaks of the "genius" of the BBC lying "in the quality of the people it attracts...
...For example, rather than mandating a certain level of pollution abatement, he would make it more expen-sive for a business to use a high-pollution product or service than a low-pollution one...
...actual no...
...It is to certify once and probably for all those two societies, "one black, one white—separate and unequal," that the Kerner Commission spied in 1968...
...Through prodigious effort, a real scholar might have prepared a fascinating exploration of the alleged theme: the degeneration of 19thcentury assurance and optimism into 20thcentury uncertainty...
...A great deal of research is now being done on the costs of accidents and of their prevention by safety regulations, but apparently no studies of the comparative costs of better law enforcement are being made...
...While the volume fails spectacularly by such criteria, its author does appear to have a sense of humor...
...B) Annual subscription price: $10.00...
...Mill gets one-quarter of a page and Marshall a bare trace) and the marginalists are not mentioned at all, Veblen is blessed with an admiring four pages, Marx with eighteen, Lenin with seven, and Keynes with fourteen...
...And he absolved the hooligans who looted lower-middle-class shops in New York, asseverating that...
...To adopt this quota system is to place blacks in an enduringly antagonistic stance towards the white majority and quite probably to condemn many of them to mediocrity...
...Public education, for instance...
...All over the country ritualistic liberals were dreaming up esoteric argu-ments gainsaying the obvious, namely, that Andy was a mindless popinjay...
...if you turn the lights out folks will steal...
...This time he Thinks Really Big...
...Lelyveld has a conspicuously stunted capacity for irony...
...Let me count the ways...
...He reiterated the discredited revi-sionist canards about American responsi-bility for the Cold War...
...actual no...
...Perhaps to his surprise, if Galbraith takes seriously his own comedy routine, the market works...
...I just can't operate on a quid pro quo basis...
...His historical fiction-alizations are found throughout, for in-stance: on Smith and Ricardo, on the In-dustrial Revolution, on colonialism, on the prerequisites of economic development, on the corporation, and on banking and monetary experience (page 191, on the Federal Reserve, is a disaster area, followed by additional errors on the same subject on pages 207-208...
...It is customary and socially approved to discuss matters of race in terms that are almost exclusively subjec tive, sentimental, and excessive...
...But Andy has drained it of almost all its poison: "I certainly didn't mean anything derogatory," he announced after calling Presidents Nixon and Ford racists...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 712...
...By agglutinating the rhetoric of the 1960s civil-rights movement with the personal liberationist rhetoric and the rhetoric of almost every other trendy leftish enthusiasm known to Beverly Hills, Andy has led much of the civil-rights movement away from the real needs of the minority poor and toward the fanciful needs of the salon revolutionaries and the self-realization bores...
...For today's civil-rights movement, Andy is as obsolete as Marcus Garvey and Father Divine...
...Following his treatment of the classicists and the Marxist types, there is only Keynes and a bow to Fisher...
...3626.—Ronald E. Burr, Business Manager...
...of issues published annually: Ten...
...Often difficult matters of policy are best handled by un-cluttered, general, non-discretionary pro-cedures...
...For how will such a system ever be ended, when and by whom...
...It is not hard to imagine the con-cern of textile industry management on learning that NIOSH's director, Dr...
...This does not necessarily mean more data—the government is already faced with too much—but better data con-cerned with costs and benefits, not with justifying the survival of a regulatory staff or acceding to pressures that are against the public interest...
...An even more hilarious instance of his gift for polemical auto-intoxication occurred when he de-fended the Cuban presence in Angola to a CBS interviewer: "Q...
...I really believe in meeting with anybody and everybody...
...Moreover, the review of clas-sical economic theory presented here is absurdly brief, suggesting the profundity of Winnie the Pooh...
...We were in Vietnam at the invitation of a series of governments—South Vietnamese...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 1,100...
...Unfortunately, Galbraith is not enough to explain the twentieth century...
...Julius Lester, who asserted: "The continuing calls for the resignation of United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young are a sad but real reminder that a particularly pernicious kind of racism is alive and well...
...He is often a misleading and distracting mentor...
...In a fabulous six-month period Andy roared as though he were special Ambas-sador to the UN from Cosmopolitan maga-zine...
...It is hard to imagine how such conditions can do anything other than encourage racial prejudice...
...If I can't establish a line of trust, I'd rather not be bothered...
...3626 provides in pertinent part: "No person who would have been entitled to mail matter under former section 4359 of this title shall mail such matter at the rates provided under this subsection unless he files annually with the Postal Service a written request for permission to mail matter at such rates...
...Lelyveld had said...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 3,625...
...e.g., compare the costs of more complicated and expensive auto-safety devices with the costs of more effective enforcement of BOOK REVIEW The Age of Uncertainty traffic laws against speeding or drunk driving...
...G) Total: average no...
...I certify that the statements made by me above are correct and complete.—Ronald E. Burr, Business Manager...
...If it was wrong for the United States to be in Vietnam, why The American Spectator December 1977 little minimizes overt error...
...The spectacle of Andy Young has been produced by liberal racism and the afore mentioned impulse of American eminen toes to ham it up in the trashiest manner imaginable...
...A) No...
...Similarly, he would encourage indirect but powerful control incentives such as the "use of 'sumptuary' excise taxation, as we have grown accustomed to in the cases of tobacco products and alcoholic beverages ...to alter basic production and consump-tion patterns...
...Instead, we are presented with bits of supposed history and sociology, pitched in both exposition and substance at the junior-high-school level, the sketches often embellished -with a generalization or aphorism to suggest learning, shrewdness, and wry dispassion...
...Perhaps Galbraith actually considers all this to be judiciously evenhanded...
...As Weidenbaum points out, the real challenge is to build up our knowledge of the trade-offs between the costs and bene-fits of both existing regulations and pro-posals for new regulations so that legisla-tors and regulators can make better decisions...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 15,238...
...actual no...
...if so, he makes it strikingly obvious that professional integrity is not everything...
...But such experiences do not necessarily build charall but invariably, is in confronting them...
...actual no...
...But the scripture continues to be quoted, and the following keeps following...
...9. For completion by nonprofit organizations authorized to mail at special rates (Section 132.122, PSM): The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for Federal income tax purposes have not changed during the preceding 12 months...
...In that statement Andy has a perfect score: Everything about it is wrong...
...Ours is a turbulent society and the moral fervor of liberals is famous for its inconstancy...
...But, as Weidenbaum observes, many social goals can be achieved most efficient-ly by business enterprise in the private sector...
...The arrogance is understandable enough...
...We know that Galbraith is a scholar: He has been a professor at Harvard...
...3. Frequency of issue: Monthly except July and September...
...Crime must be controlled and order restored...
...Moreover, with the collapse of Jim Crow, the black man's problems became more subtle, and per-haps more intractable...
...Even President Carter must have laughed aloud when, during the famed Playboy interview, Andy accused one of his favorite targets, Mr...
...Professor Weidenbaum argues that as a result of this invasion, a "managerial revo-lution is now underway, a silent bureau-cratic revolution, in the course of which much—but certainly not all—of the deci-sion-making in the American corporation is shifting...from the professional manage-ment selected by the corporation itself to the vast cadre of government regulators who are influencing and often controlling the key managerial decisions of the typical business firm...
...Weidenbaum proposes not to do away with regulation, but to reduce direct controls and substitute, wherever feasible, economic incentives...
...A. The Cubans were in Angola at the invitation of...the MPL and...Q...
...The hauteur wafting from this last botch is characteris-tic, for Andy is the victim of a grandiose and stultifying arrogance...
...8. Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities: None...
...To this end, he urges that govern-ment retreat from forms of regulation that require intervention in internal business decision-making...
...40 vain and foolish as Andy, or is he saying that blacks and whites have such disparate cultural values that no understanding or intelligent communication can exist between them...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 18,805...
...Of course, Americans have misused the word "racism" for over a decade, often employ-ing it where the term "racial prejudice" was apposite...
...With it established that government is to decide the extent of a group's social participation, blacks will be in a perilous situation...
...samples, complimentary, and other free copies: average no...
...actual no...
...They are the bene ficiaries of moral fervor today...
...Presumably the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League can now turn their efforts to producing travelogues...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 250...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 22,500...
...Lester saying that all blacks are as U.S...
...And perhaps to show that he (in contrast to those silly establishment economists) is a Man of the People, Galbraith is not above occasional cute coarseness...
...But the Devil seductively quotes scripture, and Galbraith, too, has a following...
...7. Owner: The Alternative Educational Foundation, Inc., 102 West Sixth Street, Bloomington, Indiana 47401...
...Today he is the black man's burden...
...2) Mail subscriptions: average no...
...Gently, the interviewer reminded Andy that as a Jew who had grown up in Hitler's Germany the former Secretary of State "surely knows something about racism...
...This is said with typical and becoming modesty, for Galbraith here speaks only of the rest of us: He is not at all uncertain in facing the problems of our time...
...Time and again he was up against barbarians like Mr...
...12...
...actual no...
...But Galbraith manages to mangle much even in this coffee-table primer...
...If only we depose, and dispose of, those grubby, devious, nefarious wielders of power, who so rejoice in the miseries of downtrodden mankind, and replace them with Galbraithians...
...It can innovatively add to theory, it can fruitfully apply analysis, it William R. Allen is professor of economics at UCLA and president of the International Institute for Economic Research...
...But the most remarkable statement came from a Mr...
...The lay reader receives hardly a sugges-tion of the complexities of the issues...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 18,805...
...tion of OSHA standards...
...actual no...
...And we know that this is a sophisticated book: It is a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, and it is praised by Leonard Silk of the New York Times...
...The inner city must be able to offer today's immigrants the same opportunities open to immigrants in the past...
...Young is a cool and prag-matic politician with a far-flung network of contacts and a quarterback's sense of timing," intoned Joseph Lelyveld in the New York Times Magazine...
...Why...
...The Galbraithian deficiencies go beyond analytical shallowness and bad manners...
...Their ill-conceived premises aside, Andy's raucous and boozy homilies on racism are simply irrelevant to the civil-rights movement today...
...By now every washroom attendant in New York knew that Andy was a light-weight...
...For bud-getary reasons, NIOSH "signed an agree-ment with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union to conduct a study of safety and health hazards in the clothing indus-try...
...And there is the degeneration of Galbraith's own approach of focusing on 38 The American Spectator December 1977 economic ideas and their repercussions...
...E) Total distribution: average no...
...they could easily be its victims tomorrow...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 2,217...
...Andy was a young man, yet almost always he was dealing with his moral inferiors...
...10...
...The Swedes were "terrible racists," the British quite possibly had "invented racism," the Russians were "the worst racists in the world," and Queens was as hellish as Sweden...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 18,575...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 1,294...
...Then Andy played "Variations on a Theme of Racism" to the amusement and bewilderment of the world...
...actual no...
...Editor: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., 102 West Sixth Street, Bloomington, Indiana 47401...
...They'll do that in Switzerland, too, especially if they're hungry...
...one-third of the book is taken up with photographs—some in living color—including one showing the author's initials carved on a barn door...
...Even more worrisome is the acceptance of the idea that blacks be left just ten or eleven percent of the Republic's professional positions...
...Well, this is a pretty book—good binding, big print, lots of pictures...
...But in truth, Galbraith is not so much funny as unamusingly ludicrous...
...Andy was once one of the most influential blacks in the Republic...
...In accordance with the provisions of this statute, I hereby request permission to mail the publication named in Item 1 at the phased postage rates presently authorized by 39 U.S.C...
...What is more, Andy has no sense that words have meanings defined by authori-ties other than himself...
...Extent and nature of circulation: (A) Total no...
...Drugs, vice, and general social disinte-gration continue to destroy the very con-ception of neighborhood in our inner cities...
...On national tele-vision, "you got me there" ! Not even Warren Gamaliel Harding suffered through such a moment...
...In baseball, a fielder who does not touch the ball cannot be charged with an error...
...Is Mr...
...At best, the treatment could hardly have been adequate...
...F) Copies not distributed: (1) office use, left over, unaccounted, spoiled after printing: average no...
...This is the racist mecha-nism which unconsciously expects and demands that any black in a position pre-viously or usually occupied by a white con-duct him or herself as whites wish, i.e., act, think and be like a white person...
...A vast amount of scholarship sug-gests that new approaches to urban social problems are necessary, the older solu-tions having quite possibly worsened the urban condition...
...The difficulty, isn't it wrong for the Cubans to be in Angola...
...But there are difficulties...
...In the last third of the book there is no substantive mention of economists, and our only source of "ideas" —aside from a small sample of public figures—is Galbraith himself...
...and the treatment of these writers, like that of all others in the book, is heavily biographical and anecdotal...
...Black problems there only sym-bolize the fact that the whole system never has made the adjustment to a modern, urban America...
...Thirteen years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Andy and his supporters have managed to trivialize the discussion of race so completely that every bigot in the country is suddenly indebted to them...
...q The American Spectator December 1977...
...Smith is allotted a scattered half-dozen pages, Malthus less than one, and Ricardo fewer than two...
...and Mr...
...Republicans were not assuaged, and as they howled for his job he scrambled for forgiveness, explaining that racism, the terrible judgment he had been visiting on so many, was merely an "insensitivity to cultural differences...
...q John Kenneth Galbraith / Houghton Mifflin / $17.95 Once again we are the beneficiaries of the wit and wisdom, the erudition and analytic prowess of John Kenneth Galbraith...
...He speaks of writing "careful essays," of making "a central point briefly and with accuracy and clarity," of having "added something that is accurate to knowledge...
...Peter J. Nord, was also to be on the ILGOVU payroll...
...11...
...But the Galbraithian distinctions, alternatives, and criteria are simplistic...
...5. Location of the headquarters or general business offices of the publishers: 102 West Sixth Street, Bloomington, Monroe County, Indiana 47401...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 16,338...
...for reasons of inertia, pecuniary interest, passion or ignorance, we do not wish to say so...
...q acter, and when Andy entered national politics in the 1970s the moral questions became more complicated...
...Few [of the problems we have been discussing], if any, are difficult of resolution...
...in scholarship, an author who says EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) which is best read with timpani rumbling just offstage: "The problems blacks face today are the problems whites will face in a couple of years...
...Hope-inspiring...cool, artic-ulate, reliable," crooned the Saturday Review...
...We know what needs to be done...
...Galbraith gives no hint that genuine scholars have wrestled with this subtle problem in the sociology of knowledge...
...The black man does not need the moralistic prattle and psychological pish-posh so popular with Andy and his chichi liberal friends...
...A) Publication no.: 303190 2. Date of filing: October 1, 1977...
...While the whole of the classical and neoclassical survey fits into an unsympathetic dozen pages (J.S...
...Postal Service Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation 1. Title of Publication: The American Spectator...
...Henry Kissinger, of flagrant ignorance regarding racism...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 22,500...
...No one who knows him, however, would question his diplo-matic skills," the judicious Mr...
...But the only person I'd be reticent about meeting with is Idi Amin...
...So over the years Galbraith has received more critical review and assessment than he deserves, and he has had his ears pinned back by some of the best ear-pinners in the business—Hayek, Demsetz, Friedman, Stigler...
...An entire generation of young blacks is in danger of passing into adulthood without ever having acquired the tools necessary for constructive participation in modern society...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 16,476...
...Andy is apparently haunted by a pro-clivity for introducing that precise line of argument most likely to blast apart his own case...
...During all those years of fighting the South's Jim Crow laws Andy was in a morally unassailable position...
...Belsen and Auschwitz might never have been built had Hitler been a member of The Club Mediterranee or a reader of Gourmet magazine...
...He sees this revolution as "neither deliberate nor violent," but nevertheless "forcing a fundamental change in the structure of our society...
...Weidenbaum thinks the latter costs would be much smaller...
...Managing Editor: Steven C. Munson, 102 West Sixth Street, Bloomington, Indiana 47401...
Vol. 11 • December 1977 • No. 2
