Condescensional Wisdom

Washington Post ^ | 5/4/06 | George Will

[blitzgig]

John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist who died last week in his 98th year, has been justly celebrated for his wit, fluency, public-spiritedness and public service, which extended from New Deal Washington to India, where he served as U.S. ambassador. Like two Harvard colleagues -- historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Sen. Pat Moynihan, another ambassador to India -- Galbraith was among liberalism's leading public intellectuals, yet he was a friend and skiing partner of William F. Buckley. After one slalom down a Swiss mountain, inelegantly executed by the 6-foot-8-inch Galbraith, Buckley asked how long Galbraith had been skiing. Thirty years, Galbraith said. Buckley mischievously replied: About as long as you have been an economist.

Galbraith was an adviser to presidents (John Kennedy, a former student, and Lyndon Johnson) and presidential aspirants (Adlai Stevenson and Eugene McCarthy). His book "The Affluent Society," published in 1958, was a milestone in liberalism's transformation into a doctrine of condescension. And into a minority persuasion.

In the 1950s liberals were disconsolate. Voters twice rejected the intelligentsia's pinup, Stevenson, in favor of Dwight Eisenhower, who elicited a new strain in liberalism -- disdain for average Americans. Liberals dismissed the Eisenhower administration as "the bland leading the bland." They said New Dealers had been supplanted by car dealers. How to explain the electorate's dereliction of taste? Easy. The masses, in their bovine simplicity, had been manipulated, mostly by advertising, particularly on television, which by 1958 had become the masses' entertainment.

Intellectuals, that herd of independent minds, were, as usual, in lock step as they deplored "conformity."

[blitzgig]

While graciously eulogizing Galbraith, George Will rather skillfully dissects his philosophy. Any thoughts?

[Semper Paratus]

WFB wrote a very good eulogy for his friend that praises his humanity but doesn't let him off the hook for his economics.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1625902/posts

[trashcanbred]

...but Galbraith, reluctant to allow empiricism to slow the flow of theory, was never a martyr to Moynihan's axiom that everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.

Buckley also pointed out in his piece on Galbraith that he spent his remaining years "bailing out water of a sinking ship". I think that is his whole life's story, that he could never reconcile his economic beliefs with empirical data.

[Rummyfan]

After one slalom down a Swiss mountain, inelegantly executed by the 6-foot-8-inch Galbraith, Buckley asked how long Galbraith had been skiing. Thirty years, Galbraith said. Buckley mischievously replied: About as long as you have been an economist.

Galbraith may have called himself an economist, yet he really saw himself as a moralist.

[nathanbedford]

Here is my post of several days ago:

As part of a college honors program, we were required to read The Affluent Society over the summer and render a report first thing upon our return to college. I was a freshly minted college sophomore with strong but primitive conservative instincts and little wariness for the hidden agendas which motivated the political science professors running the honors program. I was shortly to be disabused of my ignorance.

Essentially, The Affluent Society, itself has an agenda, to rationalize the taking of your liberty and vesting it in the state. Galbraith exploited his agility with a pen and succeeded in convincing a large portion of our people that the elites who run the think tanks and universities and the government regulators are smarter than we are. His proof that we are stupid? We waste money on big fins attached to the back ends of our automobiles but fail to spend that money for the programs which later came to be known under the rubric, The Great Society. In fact, so well did Galbraith succeed that the popular justification for the great society was laid down in this book and ultimately accepted by the public at large.

My conservative principles, although not yet tempered, were strong enough and clear enough to see that the question was individual liberty versus collective control. Once one accepts Galbraith's premise, that society exercising individual choice squanders its resources, the argument is virtually over. One must maintain the high ground, that individual liberty is worth the inevitable waste. That waste is the price we pay for innovation, for growth, and ultimately for economic and political freedom. Finally, that waste, compared to the institutionalized waste committed by governments, is cheap indeed. Ultimately, the question is, do you want to pay the price the Italians paid to make their trains run on time?

To college professors, the temptation to make the trains run on time is irresistible. Galbraith's career itself demonstrates that. These were the heady days along The New Frontier. We had thrown off the shackles of the boring 1950s and we had inherited from that decade wealth beyond our experience. The professors were focused on how to get their hands on that wealth while forgetting how it was created. No, they did not want it for themselves, they wanted a great society do good with it. Lyndon Johnson gave them a chance and our eletes gave us The Great Society.

These professors are all dead now, not enjoying Galbraith's longevity but their legacy and his survives mere mortal life span. The temptation to do good by ultimately invoking the physical power the state to control people's choices and spend their money for them is difficult for any generation or culture to resist.

ttp://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1623998/posts

[nightdriver]

I'll never forget watching Galbraith bragging about how clever he was during WWII when he was on some commission that (illegally) imposed rationing on tires.

There had been no law enacted at the time to stipulate that tires should be rationed, but he was on some obscure commission that did it anyway.

Typical of liberals - just dictator wannabes in different guise.

[USFRIENDINVICTORIA]

I remember being very impressed with Sen. Moynihan's writings about the welfare system 30 years ago. Among other things, he described the damage the system was doing to black families. He was at least 20 years ahead of his time. They don't seem to make New York senators like that any more. (I'm Canadian; so I could be missing something -- I'm only commenting on some of his essays.)

[Rummyfan]

Well said.

[ClearCase_guy]

I'm not always a fan of George Will, but this is a good piece.

Will's observations about the link between Advertising (an irresistable force which takes advantage of gullible Americans) and the whole Liberal mind-set (disdain for the masses who are just puppets of Big Corporations) was something I had not heard before. Interesting.

[Thebaddog]

I was enjoying Will's jabs about the lack of creative original thinking by the lieberals.

[nathanbedford]

Thanks

[KC_Conspirator]

This is the same idiotic Galbraith who predicted in the 80's that the Soviet economy was as strong as ever and would outlast the US and the West.

[robowombat]

WFB is a more generous man than many. But then he was an Ivy League grad and recognized as the tolerated house 'conservative intellectual' by the cognoscenti.

To many 'average' Americans who had to deal with JKG in some mundane way they found him a haughty, snobbish, contemptuous boor. He clearly believed he was put on earth to lead the swinish masses to something better than TV and air conditioned suburban housing. What exactly was never stated but I always had the idea it was 'high density housing', 'public transportation, and subsidized 'educational programs' sort of like PBS only more 'high culture'.

JKG was a snob and boor and no friend of normal Americans.

[robowombat]

In his me moires JKG remembers with quiet glee the contemptuous stiffing he gave to a highly decorated NCO on a flight back from Europe in 1945 or 46. He fairly states that the man had several rows of ribbons and he could read them well enough to know that several of them were decorations for valor. He goes on to repeat how he stymied each attempt at conversation the soldier or airman attempted by contemptuously stonewalling his inquiries about who he thought looked good to win the American League pennant or what hobby he had. Galbraith can scarcely contain his straightforward glee that he a civilian could so easily discomfit a returning war hero. The fact that he chose to tell this story on himself and remembered it in such lip smacking detail after decades says just what sort of person JKG was. Those men who had just help[ed protect his precious hide for the last four years were nothing more than human cr*p to him. That is how he saw 'normal' Americans. Just a herd of swine for the likes of him to bully and herd.

[razorback-bert]

The left gained controlled of the media and cannot fathom why we fail to buy their products (global warming, anti-smoking,anti- guns, etc) today.

[driftless]

A short summation of Galbreath's (and all libs) philosophy is that all Americans should turn over their incomes to them (the libs), and the libs will know how to use the money to the best effect. Their goal is very simple: high taxes, and high government interference in the lives of average people. That's because average people are too stupid to spend their own money correctly. How's that?

[tet68]

That's because average people are too stupid to spend their own money correctly. How's that?

That's why Hillery! is going to have to make the tough choices for our own good.

Retch....

[Revolting cat!]

Actually, 'conventional wisdom' is a good description of pedestrianism, echo chamber opinions and Captain Obvious discoveries. JKG invented it?