economist

This is a birthday tribute book, in which a famous author, Harvard professor, economist, former Ambassador to India, and incredible wit is praised in print by people who find themselves honored by the opportunity to detail their links with John Kenneth Galbraith. Many names are scattered throughout the book, which has no index for finding them again. All my life I have wanted to be smart enough to be as witty as JKG, and in the present economic situation, it is a great comfort to find evidence that so many people share that aspiration. Freud is mentioned as a possible source of "a similar remark about individual people in psychoanalysis" needed for a comparison on page 126 with a comment of Karl Marx in CONTRIBUTION TO THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, originally published in 1859, "Mankind inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve." Conversations between these people can be daunting when it seems to lack any point whatever, and JKG has the kind of courage that it takes not to worry when an interest in political economy puts someone in a spot which requires responses at a level which most people have trouble maintaining at their best, responding to cues about basic conditions that establish who they are in ways that the inquisitive JKG could notice, when it was missing in those who had formerly been powerful, as when he met ex-Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas Home and told Roy Jenkins, "Who was that man? I thought he was Alec Home." (p. 50).

Power is a major consideration in this book, as a factor that was not adequately considered in the mainstream economic theory of motives which were thought classically to drive supply and demand. JKG noticed that the affluent society's maximization of production produced an increased need for public goods like trash collection and police to protect people from being swindled. The friendly tributes at the beginning of the book frequently note how tall and witty JKG was, and pages 161-175 at the end provide examples from books that JKG wrote of his thoughts on Farming, The Scotch, Rules of Academic Life, Economics and Economists, Writing, Politics, Politicians, Family, Places, and The Wisdom of Age. My favorite choice of words, "or a drunken bat," (p. 171) occurs in the section on Politics, and seems less hyperbolically suggestive of the fears that the Scotch possessed and the way everyone felt in 1968 than the kind of comparison which JKG used to describe a government crisis, in addition to "or a drunken bat."

I have not been doing Harvard many favors in recent thoughts which associate it most frequently with the Unabomber, Daniel Ellsberg, or Henry the K., who was repudiated when he might have wished to retain the kind of association with Harvard that JKG maintained for 50 years. Galbraith was a key adviser to JFK, and his book LETTERS TO KENNEDY still makes interesting reading, but JKG did not stay on for the debacle produced by President Johnson, and many in this book considered JKG a leader of the effort to oppose the Vietnam war. Political party was not an overriding consideration for JKG, certainly not in 1981 when he wrote the description of Johnson which is included in this book, that might be applied to Woodrow Wilson or any number of American presidents.

"Johnson sought to compensate for his uncertainty in foreign policy with an outward display of firmness, strength, decisiveness. This made him open to the advice of those who urged the seemingly strong as distinct from the restrained and considered course. Perhaps also his instinct was for an assertively masculine pose, as others have suggested. Combined, these qualities put him at the mercy of those who took pride not in their knowledge but in their will to act. Thus the disaster in Southeast Asia." (p. 173).

Seriously, though, there is a section on Economics in this book and an attempt throughout to present phrases which JKG ought to get credit for adding to the vocabulary of political economy. On the birthday question, if you hurry, you should be able to obtain and read this book prior to October 15, 2003, when John Kenneth Galbraith will be 95 and coincidentally, Friedrich Nietzsche will be 159, though Nietzsche has been dead more than a hundred years. This book starts with, "Thorstein Veblen" (pp. xii, 26, 30-31, 35, 36), "he could see little difference between a communist jungle and a capitalist one." (p. 9). "Galbraith's complaints against atmospheric nuclear testing" (p. 10), "endless meetings and far too many people." (p. 11). "I came to oppose strongly the widely applauded Reagan-Bush policy of reaching out to Saddam Hussein" (Peter Galbraith, appointed United States Ambassador to Croatia in 1993, worked extensively on Iraq in the late 1980s, p. 13). "During World War II, in the very opposite of the Keynesian stereotype, Galbraith and a few others in the Office of Price Administration actually produced a decline in prices during wartime. . . . Inflation dropped from 9.7 percent in 1941 to 2.1 percent in 1944." (p. 18). "his ability to distinguish carefully between real motives and pretense" (p. 23), "sought-after public speaker" (p. 24) "an extremely fluent writer, a quality that journalistic exigencies had fostered in him. From that time onward, I think, he always believed that he had to write something every day." (p. 24). "even truer today than it was then, although today the outstanding gap is that between private affluence and public poverty." (p. 26). "American farmers, today about 1 percent of the population, produce more than they did as 25 percent of the population in 1930." (p. 32). "American Academy of Arts and Letters; from 1984 to 1987 he served as its president." (p. 34). "countervailing power" (p. 37) "he vividly contrasted the `social imbalance' between the opulence of private consumption and the starvation of public services." (p. 37).

helped me get me texts quicker, and my mental comparisons make a lot more sense.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe (1949- ) is a philosopher and economist writing in the "classical" Austrian tradition, which is to say in the tradition of Mises and Rothbard. He is also one of the most creative thinkers in that tradition. (His work, Democracy: The God that Failed, is a brilliant extension of Austrian thought into the realm of politics.)

This little work (which is a collection of some stuff previously printed) provides a good introduction to and defense of Austrian methodology. The question is this: what is the status of the laws and principles of economics? Are principles such as "the law of marginal utility" everywhere and on all occasions true, or are they empirical generalizations subject to falsification? Mises - writing in the tradition of Kant and Leibniz - argued that the principles of economics are a priori. Misesian methodology therefore falls within the Kantian and rationalist tradition. (Hoppe rejects the interpretation of Kant given by Rand as "arrogant ignorance.) Economics, according to Mises, is closer to disciplines such as logic and mathematics than it is to the natural sciences. In his defense of the Austrian method, Prof. Hoppe provides brief but useful critiques of empiricism, historicism, and relativism.

Mises's central works in this area are Human Action, Epistemological Problems of Economics, Theory and History, and The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science.

This book does much to advance the marginalist-subjectivist paradigm in economics. Most economists treat time trivially in their analysis. Some, like Gary Becker, correctly recognize the need to examine how people allocate the only non-renewable resource- time. The Becker approach uses static equilibrium models to address this issue. This represents an advance over the rest of mainstream analysis, but holds the data that people acquire through time constant. This makes convergence on equilibrium conditions possible, if not certain.

Following the work of Mises and Hayek, the authors of this book examine the implications of how knowledge develops through time. As people interact, they learn and change data relevant to their economic plans. We learn and create knowledge simultaneously, and do this differently depending upon the choices we make. Consequently, convergence on equilibrium conditions in markets is not inevitable, and may not even be possible. This makes the concepts of 'real time' and 'ignorance' that the authors discuss relevant to all economics analysis.

This allows us to consider information problems other than second best rational ignorance. We not only know that we do not know some things. We face gaps in our data concerning what we consider finding out about.

This does not mean that equilibrating forces do not exist. It means only that we must consider open ended processes in markets. This is not a new proposition. Adam Smith, the founder of economics as a distinct discipline, thought in evolutionary and process orientated terms.

If there is anything wrong with this book, it is that the authors might be a little too dismissive of conventional economics. Conventional notions of supply, demand, and equilibrium help us to understand economics more than the authors will admit. This approach simplifies many real world complexities. The static approach is not entirely unreal, and does contain enough reality to play an important role in economic analysis. Mainstream economists should, however, be mindful of the extent to which static optimization models fail to explain real world phenomena.

I am not familiar with "The New Leader," in which each article in this book originally appeared as a column "The Dismal Science." Readers are assumed to be bright enough to hope for a society in which people can find jobs, make enough money to pay their bills, and be puzzled when they notice a few items repeated endlessly in "The New York Times" about things which the Federal Reserve expected to climb when something else goes down, but which had exhibited a history of climbing as nothing but money in a modern economy could ever expect to grow, in spite of efforts to watch the amount of money more closely than anything else. Texts in this book do not appear in chronological order, with "Trickle-Down Greed" from January 1982 showing up on page 109, when the ideas of the rich, it can finally be admitted, "have gone a long way toward destroying the morale of the American people." If I really wanted a job, I might be much less willing to agree so wholeheartedly, as such political wishful thinking is becoming a major obstacle to intellectual forms of slavery for a living wage.

This book is a collection of articles from exciting (volatile) times, some when interest rates were high because of inflation, when it was easy to do a few calculations and show that the extra amount of interest being paid yearly on all debt "costs close to three times as much as the federal deficit the bankers moan about." With lower interest rates, "we'd be running a surplus, not a deficit." (p. 36). In a perfect world, with a lower interest rate, we "would quickly and powerfully stimulate investment in productive enterprise, with a consequent growth in employment. It would trigger a one-time surge in the stock and bond markets, followed by a gradual tapering off of speculation." (pp. 36-37). Obviously right about the December 1988-January 1989 circumstances in which that projection was made, readers now can only wonder how stupid a vast speculative bubble based on the belief in a total change in the nature of the economy in the 1990s could seem in 2003, when the federal deficit grows at a time of incredibly low interest rates. None of our problems are Brockway's fault, though he is still right about "The number of people living in poverty is growing, and within that group the number of those who work full time yet are poverty stricken is growing faster still." (p. 37).

Brockway was trying to look this far ahead. "Well into the twenty-first century, for instance, we will be paying up to 15.75 percent interest on a trillion dollars' worth of Treasury bonds sold in the wonder-working days of former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul A. Volcker." (pp. 38-39). This could have been part of a plan, and however stupid our current situation seems, one explanation could be that someone would like to produce a financial disaster so big that it will forever destroy the expectations of millions of people who could easily be deprived of everything by those who have the power to do so. This book sure makes it seem like it could be part of a plan, like NAIRU: the "nonaccelerating inflationary rate of unemployment." (p. 28). Trying not to pick on anyone with a lot of power, Peter G. Peterson, President Nixon's secretary of commerce in 1972 (p. 57), is accused of being "a great sleight-of-hand artist." (p. 61). "Finally, consider the aftertax income of the median families (this is where the wealthy shone like burnished gold). In 1986 dollars it fell . . . When you include the increase in Social Security taxes (largely engineered, as aforesaid, by Peterson), the fall was much greater. In short, from 1977 to 1986, poverty was up a third; weekly earnings were down 10.4 percent; the median income was up 1.7 percent; but the after-tax income of the median family was down 5.3 percent. And the after-tax incomes of the wealthy more than doubled. This is what Peterson and his ilk are fighting for." (p. 62).

"Economists Can Be Bad for Your Health," an article from December 1993, is about "The dense complexity of the Clinton plan, particularly all the stuff about managed competition, was intended to achieve" (p. 85) market discipline. The same title might apply to a conference committee effort to produce drug benefits for elderly patients in 2003, if the Senate, House, Democrats, and Republicans who passed very different forms of economic inducement can bring market discipline up to date. What Brockway calls "a beautifully apposite example" (p. 86) involving a drug used on sheep for "six cents a dose" (p. 87) was priced much higher after the Mayo Clinic, "conducted tests, at its own expense, then the Food and Drug Administration reviewed the findings and approved the drug for human use." The economic argument for Medicare coverage is "Medicare's loss ratio is in the 90s. In other words, the market discipline imposed by competition among giant insurance companies costs the consumer at least 20 percent more than a government-run single-payer system." (p. 89).

"Starving All the Way from the Bank" is about how loans to Third World nations are in terrible trouble. Based on the book, DEBT TRAP: RETHINKING THE LOGIC OF DEVELOPMENT by Richard Lombardi, Third World debt, $7.6 billion in 1960, was a trillion dollars in 1985, not likely to be paid off by "the notion that a growing GNP cures all ills." (p. 99). Any attempts to produce money in areas where the people don't earn enough to sustain life are panning out as poorly as Export-Import Bank loans to "The national airlines of countries of fewer than a half million souls, most of them tribesmen . . . bought fleets of Boeing 747 jumbo jets." (p. 99). Boeing and someone else got money in their pockets, not the tribesmen, but banks want that money now, too.

A Quaker economist looks at economic development through the eyes of his religion, becomes dissatisfied with his work as economic advisor, and tries to find a path for helping overcome economic development. (This book is once again in print).

David Arnold has succeeded in bridging the hiatus existing between fact and fiction;theory and practice. I find the book quite refreshing and exciting. No doubt, students and Marketing practitioners will find it handy and extremely useful

Christine has evidently worked very hard on this book, travelling around the globe to interview those who knew John Hewson before he entered politics.

Her book is one of two biographies published shortly before Hewson almost became Prime Minister in 1993. Rather unfortunate timing as Hewson retired soon after and disappeared off the radar screen of public life.

Rather like Christine's next champion, Paul Keating, who defeated Hewson, but was savagely booted out in 1996 by the voters, who hadn't expected him to beat Hewson and extracted their revenge.

Kim Beazley had two goes at the top job, but was defeated each time, despite Christine's solid help the second time around.

She seems to be able to administer the kiss of death in a charming and well-researched manner.

It's unexpectedly well decscibed how's Keynes in his childhood. He's in fact a well-spoken, witty gentleman with its charms inside which is mysterious. How could he become such a great economist, how he invent the theories, how he generated such a beautiful mind. It talked about Keynes' life in Eton College( a fundamental place for him to grow up and how his schoolmates affect him), and more is in King's College,Cambridge( which definitely a crucial turning point in Keynes' life) which included keynes' letter which he sent expressed his point of views, his love to Duncan. His writings were precise but in-depth. Moreover, it also includes a lot of cultural background informations which is like Cambridge traditions.It's a must-read book if you like Keynes.

This is vol. 2 of Skidelsky's Keynes biography (any sign of vol. 3?). It is a very enjoyable (and exhaustive) account of the most productive professional years (Bretton Woods aside) of one of the great figures of the 20th century. Keynes was the son of Victorian intellectual academic bougiousie; a star of the public school system; trained in mathematics and economics (student of Marshall); student of philosophy, then a bureaucrat in academia and government, becoming an expert in public finance as a high-ranking Treasury official during WWI; a traveller in artistic circles (later a benefactor), part of the Bloomsbury group (intimate with Duncan Grant, Virginia Woolf, etc. (to differing degrees, of course)); statistician/philosopher (his first major published work was "A Treatise on Probability"); pamphleteer ("Economic Consequences of the Peace," etc.); publisher/editor for both the popular and academic press; institutional investor; currency speculator; husband to a Russian ballet dancer; and most influential economist of the 20th century. Keynes would not be possible today.

The one drawback to the Skidelsky book is that it can be slow going. Those with no background in economics should be prepared to skim sections (or work hard). If you're already familiar with the difference between Ricardo and Malthus, and how their thinking carried through Jevons, Marshall, and Marx, and can follow arguments on gold standard vs. floating exchange rates, then you should be able to breeze through.