John Kenneth Galbraith

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John Kenneth Galbraith, 1982
John Kenneth Galbraith, 1999

John Kenneth Galbraith (born October 15, 1908 in Iona Station , Ontario , Canada , † April 29, 2006 in Cambridge , Massachusetts , United States ) was a Canadian-American economist , social critic , presidential advisor , novelist and diplomat . Galbraith was one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. As a Keynesian and left-wing liberal , he worked all his life to strengthen state institutions and to promote demand .

life and work

biography

John Kenneth Galbraith was born to Scottish immigrants in southern Canada. His father was a teacher and an employee of the regional public administration ( county ). Galbraith studied agricultural economics in Toronto ( Ontario ) up to a Bachelor (B.Sc.) in 1931, then he graduated in 1933 at the University of California at Berkeley with a Master (MS). He lived in the I-House (International House) in Berkeley and received his Ph.D. from the University of California there in 1934. PhD. Growing up on a farm in Ontario made him choose an agricultural economics topic for his doctoral thesis. An early Keynesian , he was also involved in President Roosevelt's New Deal economic program to revitalize the American economy. From 1934 to 1939 he was a tutor for economics at Harvard University , where he worked on a collegial basis with Paul Sweezy . In 1937 he was allowed to go to the British University of Cambridge as a research fellow for social sciences for one year , in the same year he was also granted US citizenship. In 1939 he went to Princeton University as an assistant professor of economics after his appointment as assistant professor at Harvard had been rejected for political reasons. The majority of the faculty at the time still declined to be involved in the New Deal , even though Roosevelt was a Harvard alumnus .

In 1940 he made himself available to the government administration under Roosevelt for the supervisory authority for the control of wages and prices in the Office of Price Administration . Although prices then remained constant, it was precisely this that led to increasing protests from industry. Ultimately, the resistance against it became so great that he was forced to resign in 1943. He was a member of the Strategic Bombing Command, where he headed a department for the economic calculation of bomb damage in Germany , and advised on reconstruction in Germany after the end of the war. In 1945 he conducted the interrogation of the former armaments minister Albert Speer together with George Wildman Ball ; Galbraith recognized early on that Speer was developing a strategy of justification for his actions through the conscious manipulation of facts.

In 1949 Galbraith was finally appointed professor of economics at Harvard University . In 1955 he published his analysis of the causes of the stock market crisis in 1929, which has become a classic in economics , in his work The Great Crash 1929 . In 1959 he was appointed to the Paul M. Warburg chair, where he taught with interruptions until his retirement in 1975. The campus magazine Harvard Lampoon awarded the popular university teacher in 1976 the "Funniest Professor of the Century Award".

John Kenneth Galbraith (first from left) with John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Jawaharlal Nehru, 1961

Galbraith was available as an advisor to the presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson . John F. Kennedy knew Galbraith from his student days at Harvard and had also been advised by him as a Senator since 1952. As the new US President , Kennedy named Galbraith Ambassador to India in 1961 . Until 1963 he also advised Indian leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi on economic policy matters. Here he helped establish one of the first Indian institutes for information technology, the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur (IIT Kanpur), with the help of the Kanpur Indo-American program, with a consortium of nine US universities.

After that, Kennedy's successor Lyndon B. Johnson took his consultancy for his social democratic program of the "Great Society" to complete. Their differences over the Vietnam War could not be bridged for long, so that Galbraith took his leave in 1965. The other Democratic US presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton also valued his economic judgment, but he no longer had the same influence as before. In the fall of 1972, Galbraith was an advisor and assistant to Nixon's rival candidate George McGovern in the election campaign for the American presidency . During this time (September 1972) he traveled in his capacity as President of the American Economic Association (AEA) at the invitation of the Chinese government together with economists Wassily Leontief and James Tobin and published the book "A China Passage" in 1973 with observations of the Mao communism then prevailing in China from an American left-liberal perspective.

It was only in the last years of his life that his analyzes received more attention again and, in view of the years of economic stagnation in the western industrialized countries and the dramatic increase in national debt around the world, regained their reputation.

Galbraith was one of the few economic theorists who could clearly present complex topics to the interested public in simple language. His colleagues envied him for his wit in the language and his ease in presenting difficult issues. His opponents, on the other hand, accused him of arrogance. Because of his eloquence, his charm and wit, Galbraith was also valued as a discussion partner by his opponents such as Arthur B. Laffer . Since he was the editor of Fortune business magazine from 1943 to 1948, he was an avid author and writer of articles, book reviews and forewords. He coined it also economic terms, the entrance to the vocabulary of the general public found such as "the affluent society" ( affluent society ), "conventional wisdom" (conventional wisdom), "countervailing power" ( counter-power ) and "techno structure" (techno structure, see: Configuration by Mintzberg ). Galbraith was an extremely prolific writer, having published four dozen books and more than 1,100 magazine articles (Parker 2005, 4).

family

Galbraith left behind his wife Catherine Merriam Atwater, whom he married in 1937. They had four sons: J. Alan Galbraith is a partner in the well-known Washington law firm Williams & Connolly. Douglas Galbraith died of leukemia in his childhood. As a US diplomat, Peter W. Galbraith was, among other things, ambassador to Croatia and is now a well-known commentator on US foreign policy, particularly in Southeast Europe and the Middle East . James K. Galbraith is a noted progressive economist who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.

plant

At the center of his thinking and working was the thesis that capitalism produces both private wealth and public poverty.

In his most famous work society in abundance (The Affluent Society) he criticized the abundance supply of private goods with a simultaneous shortage in the supply of public infrastructure and services offered. He made it clear that economic activity was still based on the spirit of the 19th century : although the marginal utility of a second car was low, production still had to be increased, allegedly so as not to endanger “social peace”. As early as 1958 he warned of the negative consequences of uncontrolled economic growth for the environment .

The Affluent Society (1958) is Galbraith's most successful book, which, along with A Theory of Price Control (1952), he also counted among his two best. It has been translated into twelve languages ​​and sold more than a million times. In it Galbraith pleads for a comprehensive expansion of the welfare state . As an adviser to US Presidents Kennedy and Johnson , he advocated wage and price controls as a means of fighting poverty, since the poor are the only population group that has no lobby . He advocated seeing tax policy as a means of steering that affects all companies equally (including oligopolists ) in order to reduce inflation , and also to guarantee the unemployed a sufficient livelihood and the question of social security from the question of being employed in to decouple production.

In Economics for State and Society (German 1976) he went into the great economic importance that the free labor of housewives has for the satisfaction of the needs of private households. He referred to these women as a secret service class within modern democracy, in which men as heads of households can usually no longer afford servants, like the rich in pre-industrial times. If household chores were paid, housewives were the largest group of workers (in the 1970s U.S.).

In The Culture of Contentment (published in 1992 by Hoffmann & Campe as Die Herrschaft der Bankrotteure ), Galbraith analyzes “the suicidal goings-on of social hopefuls: on the hunt for easy money, with dubious investments, prone to corruption, short-term thinking and Political ignorance America's wealthy and wealthy have rested for too long on the fact that compliant politicians have accommodated them in every respect ... The number one world power is practically bankrupt, its international position shaken like hardly at the time of the Vietnam War. Galbraith passionately advocates for those who suffer the most from economic erosion: for the great army of the poor and for the impoverished middle class ”(from the blurb). A central insight into the nature of the political in modern Western "distributive democracies" is:

“It is not in the nature of politics, which strive for short-term satisfaction of the voters, to anticipate some unpleasant development or even to counteract expected disasters. Planning to prevent the [...] disaster ... is systematically prevented by the satisfied majority of the voters. "

- John Kenneth Galbraith: Die Herrschaft der Bankrotteure (The Culture of Contentment), Hoffmann & Campe 1992, p. 54

Galbraith later only saw himself to a limited extent as a Keynesian, but he was always a strict opponent of monetarism . His self-image as a “liberal” moved him further and further to the left in the political spectrum over the decades, as conservatism and monetarism took over ideological predominance. Galbraith feared all his life that the state would be dominated by powerful uncontrolled large corporations, and saw here in the trade unions and their corporate cooperation a possible counterweight.

Galbraith has also done a lot of research into the causes of mass poverty. Initially, the poor are often well adapted to their environment and pass this adaptation on to their children. On the other hand, those who are ready to break out of poverty run a high risk. For this reason, refugees and emigrants who showed this high level of motivation deserve special support, while for the broad masses compulsory education (e.g. through compulsory schooling for girls and boys) is decisive for changing the balance of poverty. Galbraith cited the refugees and the generally high level of education as the basis of the German reconstruction and overcoming the immense war damage after 1945 and compared this situation in Germany (quite positively) with the Sikhs in the Indian Pandjab and the successful role of the Chinese overseas .

Memberships

Awards

Fonts (selection)

  • The Affluent Society . 1958; dt .: Society in abundance. Droemer Knaur 1963–1973. ISBN 3-426-00023-7
  • Ambassador's diary. A personal account of the years with Kennedy. Munich, Droemer Knaur 1970
  • The New Industrial State. 1967; dt .: The modern industrial society. Droemer Knaur, Munich 1970–1974. ISBN 3-426-00219-1
  • Money, Whence It Came, Where It Went. 1975; German: money. Where it comes from, where it's going. Droemer Knaur 1982. ISBN 3-426-04584-2
  • Economy, peace and laughter. Essays. Droemer Knaur, Munich 1976
  • Economy for State and Society , Droemer Knaur, Munich 1976
  • China. Impressions from a trip. Droemer Knaur, Munich 1978
  • The nature of mass poverty. German: The arrogance of the satiated. Strategies for Overcoming Global Mass Poverty. Bern, Munich: Joke 1980.
  • A life in our times. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1981, X, 563 pp. (Memoir)
  • Financial Geniuses: A Brief History of Speculation. Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1992 ISBN 3821802804
    • Newly edited 2010: A Brief History of Speculation , translated from English by Wolfgang Rhiel, with a foreword by Uwe Jean Heuser, Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt am Main ISBN 9783821865119
  • The triumph. A novel of modern diplomacy. Sinclair-Stevenson, London 1994
  • History of the economy in the 20th century. An eyewitness reports. Hoffmann & Campe, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-455-11061-4
  • The Economy of Innocent Fraud. The loss of reality in today's economy. Siedler, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-88680-821-1
  • The great crash of 1929. Cause, course, consequences. Finanzbuchverlag, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-89879-054-1
  • The Anatomy of Power , German: Anatomie der Macht München 1987, Heyne Sachbuch 13 ISBN 3-453-02982-8
  • A Life in our Times . German: life in a crucial time. Memoirs Munich 1982; Heyne non-fiction book 80 ISBN 3-453-03748-0
  • The rule of the bankrupt (original title: "The Culture of Contentment"), Hoffmann & Campe, Hamburg 1992

literature

  • Gerald Braunberger: The economist and the crash , in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, October 12, 2008, No. 41, p. 30 f.
  • John S. Gambs: John Kenneth Galbraith . Twayne, Boston, Mass. 1975
  • Milton Friedman : From Galbraith to economic freedom . Institute of economic affairs, London 1978
  • Frank MacFadzean: The economics of John Kenneth Galbraith. A study in fantasy , Center for Policy, London 1977
  • Beat Meier: John Kenneth Galbraith and his pioneers. From Veblen to Galbraith , Rüegger, Grüsch 1989
  • Richard Parker: John Kenneth Galbraith. His Life, His Politics, His Economics. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2005, X, 820 S., Ill., ISBN 0-374-28168-8 ( table of contents)

Web links

Wikiquote: John Kenneth Galbraith  - Quotes
Obituaries

supporting documents

  1. ↑ John Kenneth Galbraith: "A Cloud over Civilization" , The Guardian July 15, 2004
  2. ↑ Dan van der Vat: The good Nazi. Life and Lies of Albert Speer . Henschel Verlag, Berlin 1997 ISBN 3-89487-275-6 p. 359f.
  3. ↑ mirror online: US ECONOMY JAMES GALBRAITH: “It is high time to let the bankers work for the general public” . March 23, 2009.
  4. ^ Gerhard Schwarz: The Economist as Writer , NZZ , May 2, 2006
  5. ^ Past and Present Officers. aeaweb.org ( American Economic Association ), accessed October 28, 2015 .
  6. ^ Members: John Kenneth Galbraith. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 30, 2019 .
  7. ^ Member History: John Kenneth Galbraith. American Philosophical Society, accessed August 16, 2018 .
  8. ^ Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. ase.tufts.edu, accessed October 12, 2015 .
  9. ↑ Minor Planet Circ. 56957
personal data
SURNAME Galbraith, John Kenneth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Galbraith, JK
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian-American economist, social critic, presidential advisor, and diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH October 15, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Iona Station , Ontario , Canada
DATE OF DEATH April 29, 2006
Place of death Cambridge , Massachusetts , United States