Word: economists
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...popular economist and polished diplomat, a veteran lecturer and fledgling novelist, a former presidential adviser and current cynosure of the Eastern intellectual set, John Kenneth Galbraith has long been a purveyor of predictions. For two decades they have come tumbling from his typewriter and tongue in prodigious quantities, covering every topic from women to world politics. Yet there are few predictions that Galbraith cherishes more?or wishes more that he had never felt com pelled to make?than his warning that a major U.S. involvement in Viet Nam would lead to disaster...
Certainly, President Johnson does not want for critics of his war policies. What is all too often lacking, however, is criticism that meets the tests of rationality and responsibility. Galbraith, 59, a Harvard economist whose power of persuasion and talent for popularization are as noteworthy as his Brobdingnagian size (he is 6 ft. 8 in.), offers more convincingly than almost anyone else the respectable alternative that Johnson has repeatedly demanded of his attackers. He is neither a name caller nor a placard carrier. He is no Mary McCarthy, who fatuously insists that it is the intellectual's duty merely...
...running for the governorship of Massachusetts. But his sharp wit, irrepressible candor and donnish mien would be fatal handicaps at the polls. As it is, there are many who think that he has already spread himself too thin. "The peril with becoming a Voice in the Land," says Columbia Economist Louis Hacker, a friendly critic, "is that you are expected to be knowledgeable in every subject. Galbraith has no right to be pontifical on things like Viet...
...Economists already have spent years talking about Ken (he detests being called John) Galbraith, often in exasperated tones. "Mr. Galbraith is a very talented journalist and a very bad economist," declares Neil Jacoby, dean of U.C.L.A.'s Graduate School of Business Administration. "I wouldn't have him on my faculty." University of Chicago Economist Milton Friedman, Barry Goldwater's former economic adviser, dismisses him as a phrasemaker?"old wine in a new bottle." Purrs Conservative William F. Buckley, a personal friend but philosophical foe: "Econo mists I know say everything he writes on economics is either platitudinous or wrong?...
Smith & Keynes. Galbraith's defenders pooh-pooh much of the criticism as little more than naked envy. "His tremendous vogue is very annoying to many university economists," observes the University of California's (La Jolla) Seymour Harris, a onetime Harvard colleague. "They reason that anyone with that kind of rapprochement with the general public just has to be a lousy economist. It's not true. He's the most-read economist of all time. Not even Adam Smith has been read as much." Galbraith, adds Economist James Warburg, "is the most outstanding explorer of economics since Keynes." There are those...