Editorial / Harvard's Tallest Tale

...Instinctively he understands how the intellectualoid's mind rebels at mere facts in a rush to embrace the inverted insight...

...Galbraith's eyes as he was notifiq~ of Charlie's revelation that The New l~aDT"al State changed my life...

...This was notably (continued on page 36) 4 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1977 BOOK REVIEW The Affluent Society John Kenneth Galbraith (Third Edition, Revised) / Houghton Mifflin / $7.95 George Bittlingmayer It has been almost twenty years since John Kenneth Galbraith was first inspired by the Profits of Forecasting Doom to tell us that we are engaged in a no-win rat race...

...D. at Berkeley, America would be bereft of one of the most obvious and entertalrung mountebanks since Aimee Semple McPherson or Gerald L.K...

...It is suggestive of the rich times in which we dwell that America's preeminent boomer of socialism, egalitarianism, and an end to hypocrisy in high places, is a millionaire economist and bon vivant, an erstwhile Harvard prof who winters in the Alps midst the rich and the powerful...

...Hence to keep his readers buying, not only does he dissemble by ignoring the trend toward equality, but he actually slips in a sentence calculated to inflame them: "It is only necessary to observe that for many years no serious effort has been made to alter the present distribution of income...

...Galbraith and so has his fantasies nourished and his soul well:greased...

...but a man that thinks men can be tu-rned into angels be an illiction is called a rayformer an' remains at large...

...the book had made the bibliographies of introductory social science courses everywhere...

...On the basis of the evils he has discoursed upon in his books, one clearly sees that he is a typically American hayseed mountebank retooled for a modern audience...

...He had written three books, all of which by his own admission had failed to have any impact at all...

...Unfortunately he had also pr6voked the economists to react...

...Here they go too far, for Dr...

...Yet Dr...

...The sonorous terms and their juxtaposition are so lovely as to dulcify a gout-ridden captain of industry into momentarily forgetting--even in April--that the impoverished public sector which Galbraith laments has fattened up handsomely since 1929...

...Galbraith's acuity in adapting his spiel to changing enthusiasms has now been baldly displayed in the third edition of The Affluent Society...

...Or look to Gerald L.K...

...Steel and the Republicans...

...Now the great man had his wider audience...

...Galbraith's mountebankery...

...that its claim that defense suppliers control their futures through their connections with government was ludicrous...

...Galbraith is a stunning exemplification of what Lewis Lapham calls the Great Trick...

...Galbraith is an accomplished farceur...

...the intellectualoid looks to the likes of Dr...

...There are some obligatory additions to the Introduction that mention that Keynesian economics didn't turn out to be all that was promised, and that the author had erred in not realizing what a danger defense expenditures were to peace and laughter...

...Galbraith down as a mountebank is admittedly to rattle the china, for he is admired by many of the Republic's most eminent minds...

...Galbraith made the healing gesture of declaring, "We let the right inject this poison into the American blood stream and this is the resuit...

...There you have Dr...

...By the third edition his customers had grown addicted to the egalitarian moonshine, l ~ t in the conviction that America harb01/e/i ever wider economic disparities...

...It contained no research at all, and while economists were delayed by testing his hypotheses, the book became a best seller, with those whose ears fdl with sirens every time economic questions arise...

...When it came out the profs all began carping that it was idiotic, contradictory of his nonsense in American Capitalism, and no closer to the truth...

...otherwise be the case...

...Moreover it suggests a major quality of his mind, that is, his ability instantly to abolish the truth in the service of the most highly ideologized absurdity...

...They flayed him for his notion that giant union, giant industry, and giant governm.ent all countervail against one another, checking each other's potential abuse of po.wer...

...He was to try that formula twice again, but with diminishing returns, first in The New Industrial State and then in Economics and the Public Purpose, his "final summary volume" on our ailments and his cures...

...Smith...

...Galbraith beholds mechanized divisions, revving up their Volkswagens and Volvos and roaring out of all the college towns of America...

...Eugene Field (1850-1895) A man that'd expict to thrain lobsters to fly in a year is called a loonytic...

...Oalbraith's life has not been all sauce and glory...

...Through the years his intellectual circle has included such luminous figures as Eugene McCarthy, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., George McGovern, Angie Dickinson, you name it...

...A whole generation afflicted with guilt over its own good fortune, and mildly curious about how all those goodies came into existence, and why, despite them, we are still unhappy, took its economic truth from that first edition of The Affluent Society...

...So, we remain with the question, if the new Affluent Society is pretty much like the old, what prompted it...

...To find Galbraith's antecedents one need not look to the grave of some aristocratic British philosopher...

...Galbraith they ought to take notice...

...In it Dr...

...Then it munched but 10 percent of the Gross National Product...

...One Hand Clapping This immunity to the facts and this sure sense of the gullibility of his audience have become characteristic of his work and have made him a rich man...

...In the wake of meat shortages, the interruption of many agricultural price supports, and record exports abroad, better judgment dictated that those remarks had to go...

...It's a shame Marx isn't around to do some paragraphsnipping...

...Smith...

...Putting aside the matter of the author's desire to correct a few failed predictions and to update a couple of figures, we are left with two explanations...

...Galbraith opened fantastic research opportunities for hundreds of young scholars...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1977 37...

...As far as I can judge, his humorous treatment of other people's intelligence is intentional, for it is characteristic of a truly great American mountebank to be able to run arpeggios across the whole range of human emotions...

...The second explanation is that Galbraith has at his command more economic insight than we had thought, and knows that nothing destroys a book's used-market circulation like the appearance of a new edition...

...HARVARD'S TALLEST TALE (continued from page 4) the case with The Affluent Society, where he ascribed mysterious powers of enchantmeter to advertising...

...Perhaps this is because they almost all write in an idiom vaguely suggestive of the dialect heard on police radios, but when they read Dr...

...The bombardment that Dr...

...An addition that offers some insight into the author's personality is his observation that a depression can occur before rising prices are stabilized, that is, while they are rising as in 1974...

...His apparent arrogance might be more accurately perceived as a pride in one's own inferior prejudices...

...From now on I would put in an extra year on the writing to engage a larger audience, and because of that the other economists would have to react to me...

...Galbraith then takes the opportunity to make himself appear prescient by adding in a footnote: "As the experience of the mid-seventies has also affirmed...

...Had Dr...

...Galbraith is still confident of his ability and the ability of like-minded folks to plan and direct the rest of us to a better world...

...Hesto presto Dr...

...True, their research has almost always found his conclusions doltish, but in mankind's struggle up from darkness no contribution is to be sniffed at...

...Furthermore he has deleted from the third edition certain incriminating charts, which reveal significant equalization in the first half of this century...

...Citing the experience of the Great Depression, Galbraith had observed in the earlier edition that "in the early days of the New Deal, the slaughter of little pigs, a primitive form of production control, created a mild form of political trauma...

...Galbraith's audience, creating lush opportunities for thousands of social workers, social scientists, and other prospective customers of the Galbraithian bunk...

...Professionally speaking, he was the sound of one hand clapping...

...In the third edition he updates these figures and finds Great Americans Series "Well, a good ole boy...is somebody that rides around in a pick-up truck--which I do--and drinks beer and puts 'em in a litter bag...

...He is one of the most elegant writers of English now practicing the art...

...And if this isn't bad enough, there is also a chronic "social imbalance," an insufficient provision of government services, stemming from the reluctance of the citizens to pay what Galbraith has elsewhere called their "proper taxes...

...The lesson was not lost on the great man, and from that point on, not oneof his books would be enfeebled by documentation...

...and that its assertion that corporations use their control of prices, advertising, and government intervention to lead trouble-free lives was again unsupportable...

...It sold over 100,000 copies...

...Galbraith's habit of ignoting facts and delivering up unsupportable asseverations has Constituted a very positive contribution to the study of economics: In attracting mobs of outraged economists he has stimulated a huge amount of scholarly work...

...Mailer has done it...

...The old wizard's energies are legendary, and his personal charm brings to mind Harvard's Tallest Tale Beatrice Webb at the height of her powers...

...A copy of the book was invariably to be found with the I Ching and one of Hermann Hesse's essays on navel contemplation, and its message came eventually to serve as the conventional wisdom at innumerable cocktail parties on the Upper East Side...

...The arrogance, the paternalism, the contempt for ordinary people, the reliance on ipsedixitisms regardless of their factual ricketiness, and the statism have inspired some to identify him as a child of nineteenth-century Tory Radicalism...

...This tendency toward over-production is reinforced by an aggressive and costly ($15 billion per year) advertising effort that plays on human frailties and dupes more people into working more hours than would George Bittlingmayer is a graduate student in economics at the University of Chicago...

...By the time the economists began stoning him, Dr...

...More significant is the deletion from the second edition of a paragraph that had expressed the view that agricultural over-production is inevitable in the absence of Galbraithian production controls...

...The new Affluent Society holds few surprises, and its argument should by now be familiar to any long-suffering reader of the Times Op-Ed page...

...That they have all been inimical to freedom is not so humorous...

...Galbrai~h the Madison Avenue magnificoes wexe enslaving millions of grown men and women into making purchases that were useless and at times even injurious...

...The contrast between the Soviet Union, where people choose their ends, and the United States, where people are told what to do by Madison Avenue, is indeed striking...

...It's a rare crystal ball that allows you to "predict" in 1976 what happened two years earlier...

...When at home, he upbraids ';the Establishment" for an honorarium that would make Norman Thomas blush, occasionally harangues defenseless students, and otherwise devotes himself to huckstering flyblown treatises that are snickered at b y all serious economists even as they are snatched up 4s Book-of-the-Month Club selections In a tm~ of shifting gullibility and evolving delusions I take the forty-year dance of Dr...

...Galbraith has endured from the Republic's economics departments is eminently well-deserved, but often Adam Smith's progeny grow unruly, dismissing him as a devotee of alchemy or the Lysenko of economics, and resorting to ribaldry too coarse to quote to nonacademic company...

...Charfi~ @as then a leading theorist for the back-to-the-womb movement, On purely economic grounds The New Industrial State was indeed tommyrot but as a piece of poetry it was lovely stuff, full of memorable lines about the "technostructure" and "the pathologically romantic...

...Economists as different as Sir Frank McFadzean and Robert Solow were merciless, and their minds were not changed when Charles Reich joined in the book's defense...

...True he has made a tidy fortune, but through it all he has had to endure the relentless prejudice and harassment of a dedicated band of small-minded men, the professional economists...

...Galbraith had assured himself the professorial equivalent of the guaranteed income...

...Galbraith displayed not only his ability to render beautiful the eminently preposterous but also his talent for comedy...

...That war might not have done much for the disadvantaged, but it greatly enlarged and enriched Dr...

...John Jewkes complained that "nearly all the systematic evidence has run counter to it...

...Even the slippery statistics he resorts to show as much...

...Harold Demsetz demonstrated that its statement that large corporations sacrifice profits for large sales was unsupportable...

...The first is that the new edition was born of the "need to produce" and midwifed by the publisher's advertising effort which is enticing readers with the claim that "now in its updated form, it is essential reading for all Americans...

...This judgment seems far off the mark...

...It was, if you were a bit leftish or just politically confused, an absorbing and believable drama, complete with the angels, archangels, and fallen angels of the secular heavens (Marx and Veblen battling U.S...

...Until he drew his last greedy breath he dreamt of a peasants' army of Christian morons marching out of Oklahoma, advancing gloriously on the delicatessens and libraries of New York...

...The Tennessee rube of yore has been replaced by the demi-educated sophisticate...

...His 1969 book, The New Industrial State, 36 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1977 superbly illustrates my point...

...What has changed in the new, improved edition...

...He is to economics what Harold Robbins is to the novel...

...Yesterday's yokel forked up his discretionary income for relief from bodily groans and spiritual fright...

...This would be a sad loss, for Dr...

...One can imagine the glaze coming over Dr...

...More than anyone else Oalbraith exemplities the changed conditions of modern America...

...When he writes glowingly about the "well-run and wellregulated community, with a sound school system, good recreational opportunities and a good police force--in short, a community where public services have kept pace with private production," we can imagine how badly he would like to be at the controls, running the show with the absorption of a model train fanatic, a little more recreation here, a little less production there...

...There was no inevitable tendency toward over-production...

...Think of it, President Kennedy lies dead, the only evidence available suggests that the assassin was a self-proclaimed Marxist and Castro sympathizer, and already Dr...

...and the fluent honeyfogler who once worked the hill-apes of Arkansas now gets fat and mellow on the earnest intellectualoid...

...C-alhraith has grasped what would ultimately become the intellectualoid's solemn belief, to wit, that Kennedy fell to a rightist plot...

...No Arkansas cracker was ever more smug about his belief in the Good Book and the mule than Galbraith is about his imbecile stew of Marx, Thorstein Veblen, and halfbaked Keynesianism...

...Now the sheer fecundity of Dr...

...Galbraith's career...

...Now the claim made on the jacket blurb is that "the author has...set many aspects of his basic argument into the wider perspectives opened up by the intervening years...

...There is a genuine elegance in Dr...

...Consider the major theme of The Affluent Society: our alleged "private opulence and public squalor...

...John Kenneth Galbraith as solid evidence that there is a Heavenly Father who deeply cares for his struggling children here on the good ship earth...

...Now to mark Dr...

...Apparently at the outset of his career the economists sought to sink him by a conspiracy of silence, for up to 1952 he was one of the least discussed scholars laboring at that gloomy science...

...Galbraith did so well off his disquisition on the affluent society he did even better with the war on poverty...

...he has managed to turn himself and all that he discharges into a highly' lucrative commodity...

...Oalbraith not forsaken an Iona Station, Ontario dung heap some four decades ago for a cosmetic Ph...

...And it was also a formula about whose likelihood of success Galbraith had no doubts, as he tells us in the introduction to the recently released third edition...

...His is a rare talent, and that it operates so unhesitantly and so unerringly even in time of sudden tragedy, marks it as rarer still...

...When the first edition appeared, egalitarianism fevered only a handful of America's left-wing dreamers, and so Dr...

...The story of how he overcame the economists'~narrowminded assaults on his scholarship could inspire a whole generation of Clifford Irvings...

...The slob Warbol has done it, But Oalbraith is one of the few academics who have managed it...

...Dooley's Opinions by Finley Peter Dunne himself in a pickle, for there has been considerable equalization between top and bottom income groups...

...Unchanged too is his ability to write without irony about the Soviet Union as a place where people have "the ability to concentrate their lesser scientific and engineering resources more effectively to their chosen ends...

...Galbraith's nonsense has provoked many scholars to ruminate over his intellectual origins...

...Luddite sophomores encircling New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, closing forever the messy factories, destroying the banks...

...In his first edition he states that the poorest ten percent of families and unattached individuals "received after taxes about one percent of the total money incomes," and the top ten percent of American incomes "averaged 27 times as much as the lowest tenth...

...Martin Dooley in Mr...

...The publication of American Capitalism marked a crucial turning point in Dr...

...A redneck's one that rides around in a pick-up truck and drinks beer and throws 'em out the window...

...In a manifesto that today takes on great significance he vowed that he "would not be ignored...

...That they were all grasping yahoos is amusing...

...Whether he is trying to be droll or innocently relating the opposition's ideas as he understands them is an issue over which men of good will may differ...

...Galbraith's treatment of it was brief, suggesting in fact a steady trend toward equality...

...But only if you have been, in the deepest valley can you ever know bow magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain, and Dr...

...Peruna bows out to Valium and health foods...

...William (Billy) Carter of Plains, Georgia "Speaking of art, there's a fellow over in Terre Haute can spit clean over a boxcar...

...The lowest tenth now receives "2 percent" of the total money incomes and the top ten percent now averages only "14 times" as much as the bottommost, and this is no longer "after taxes" but "before taxes...

...Further, the economists fail to appreciate the clarity and mellifluousness of his prose...

...They ho0ted him down for claiming that industrial concentrations stimulate the growth of large labor concentrations, and they threw in the coup de grdwe by pointing to the coal and trucking industries, two loosely concentrated industries famous for their powerfully concentrated unions...

...Starting with the Keynesians and ending with the Friedmamtes, they have all treated him unflatteringly...

...His woeful tirades about the injustices of the American system could move the faces of Mount Rushmore to weep, his exposds of the Wall Street mafia could arouse fires of righteous indignation in Oscar Wilde, and his innumerable variations on the theme of nineteenth-century residues in Friedmanite economics still bring a chuckle from Dr...

...Anyone ever thrown into a Kennedy swimming pool has at one time or another come under his spell, and to show him a discourtesy is to play with fire...

...In fact Dr...

...Galbraith's magisterial sense of his own power, but also his sense of fair play...

...Incidentally, only a few years after Dr...

...Look to Cotton Ed Smith standing midst the dust and horseflies of some jerkwater metropolis, terrorizing the credulous with tales of the evils of Shylock bankers and indoor plumbing...

...Shortly after his friend and patron, John F. Kennedy, was murdered, Dr...

...It was patently absurd to believe that the three have different interests when, as George Stigler pointed out, all three may very well develop a common interest in fleecing the consumer...

...The book received exuberant praise from his fans amongst the congenitally fearful, but when economists examined his claims they discovered advertising to be unexplored territory...

...Galbraith's antecedents...

...It is a mark of his incomparable achievement that--though no important economist accepts one of his books or any of his theories--John Kenneth Oalbraith stands today as the most widely recognized economist in the country, perhaps the world...

...And he is especially funny when dealing with the likes of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, or for that matter almost any intelligent writer or idea...

...Galbraith acquired his taste for this sort of thing during his World War II stint as a price controller and has been itching ever since to do social planning on a grander scale...

...Yet if the truth must be told, not much has changed from the second edition that appeared in 1969...

...We place too much emphasis on producing more goods because our notioos concerning work and production, like those of a self-made man, belong to an age of scarcity and are illsuited to an age of affluence...

...According to Dr...

...What a difference a year makes was shown in his very next book, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power...

...Galbraith now yearned for that mountain...

...Advertising executives will be guillotined immediately, and the jails will bulge with every wealthy American not working for the Department of HEW and related industries...

...It is a remark worth remembering, for it conveys not only Dr...

...Galbraith's skiing partner, William Buckley, though Buckley has been hearing the joke-in its original for thirty years...

...Galbraith's response was to mix up a potion that would sell...

...That is to say, he is a haranguer full of hatred for sound money, Eastern bankers, big business, the diversity and progress of a free society, and the dynamism and easy skepticism of urban life...

...today it chomps down over 40 percent of the GNP and smacks its lips in anticipation of the rest...