Tag Archives: redistribution of wealth

J K Galbraith and the Liberal Society

By Peter Wrigley | Wed 15th May 2024 - 7:55 am

A friend who hoards his newspapers for years has just passed on to me an interview by Roy Hattersley with JK Galbraith in the latter’s 90th year (1998)

The article is headlined “Sage of the Century”* and there is no doubt that, after Keynes’s death, Galbraith was the pre-eminent economist of the second half twentieth century. He got most things right (including opposition to the Vietnam War) and many of the issues raised in the interview are as relevant today as they were a quarter of a century ago. Indeed, having ignored his views provides a good explanation as to why we are now in our present dire predicament.

The following quotes (in italics) are from the article;

To The Affluent Society we owe the prediction of “private affluence and public squalor.” Which we can see all around us, in spades after the Margaret Thatcher inspired dominance of the inadequately regulated market since 1979.

Galbraith’s first success was his analysis of “The Great Crash” of 1929. In 1998 he predicted: “A sump will surely happen again, sooner or later. . .they are a normal feature of the market.”

Well, it did happen again, in 2008 and we are still paying for the consequences. Keynes was in favour of “animal spirits,” but I think he had in mind investors in the “real economy” rather than manipulators of the financial markets, allowed to over-reach themselves by Mrs Thatcher’s Big Bang.

“The poor are politically emasculated. They don’t vote so they don’t have a strong expression in Congress or the White House.”