Word: galbraith
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...producer of goods, Galbraith argues, the system works very well, and he scoffs at those who look upon bigness as inherently evil. Yet he does find one overriding fault: the present system puts too much emphasis on goods?washing machines, cars and gadgets?and not enough on beauty and man's search for higher values. In a sense, Galbraith is raising anew, as he did in The Affluent Society, the question of priorities and how wealth is to be divided. Instead of working 40 hours a week in order to be able to buy the full panoply of gadgets...
...book did more than add a colorful catch phrase to the language. With its analysis of poverty in America and its plea for greater attention to the public sector?housing, police, mass transit, education and welfare?it established clear guideposts for both the New Frontier and the Great Society. Galbraith offered the best summation of its philosophy when he testified against tax reduction before a congressional committee in 1965. "I am not quite sure what the advantage is in having a few more dollars to spend," he said, "if the air is too dirty to breathe, the water too polluted...
...Myriad of Myths. Galbraith's latest published work, The New Industrial State, a bestseller for the past 31 weeks, is an even more ambitious book. In it, Galbraith sets out to describe the modern economic structure minus the myriad myths that surround it. What he finds in the U.S. is a phalanx of giant companies, perhaps 500 in all, dominating the landscape. The competitive market has largely disappeared, the victim of an advertising machine that creates and manipulates demand (mostly, he maintains, by means of commercial TV). Well-schooled technicians and managers?the "technostructure"?run the show. Though...
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...