Between Friend: Perspectives on John Kenneth Galbraith

By John Kenneth Galbraith

Fifteen original essays by eminent personalities in public life, journalism, economics, and the arts, written to honor the ninetieth birthday of one of the world's most famous economists The wide... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0395971306
• ISBN13: 9780395971307
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 0.8" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Sharing a point of view

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