Watching the career path of James Galbraith has been a minor hobby of mine ever since I discovered that my interest in economics was directly related to how many of his father's books I had read. The fascination with whatever Galbraith's economics was called was based in my mind on the fact that papa John Kenneth (Ken) Galbraith grew up on a working farm in Ontario and entered the economics profession through the door of agricultural economics. He gave speeches for the Farm Bureau when starting out.
I believed this was important because:
- I trust the intellectual habits and practices of those really smart farm kids. Farming is an Ur profession. Providing for the community’s nourishment is a LOT harder than it looks. It is the basis of civilization itself. Out of this scramble came the people who literally built the country. And they created social structures as enlightened as any in human history.
- Yea, for the home team. While I envied the childhood of James and wished I could have sat in a corner as JKG discussed the affairs of the world with the best educated economic minds of his generation, I could not. Northwest North Dakota is a LONG way from Harvard. What I could do, however, was recreate the education the farm kid from Ontario got watching his parents and neighbors as they sought to invent a way to get farming to pay the bills out at the thin edge of civilization. Products of this struggle have a reality base that informs the rest of their thoughts. Done right, the resulting thinking can be quite spectacular.
And so, while I avidly read JKG’s books and articles and tried very hard to emulate his thought processes, I was really interested in Jamie’s life because, after all, he is only three years younger than I. If the economics that JKG and friends had been perfecting since the earliest days of Roosevelt’s New Deal was to survive, the next generation of economists would have to learn the institutional practices that actually pushed forward the project of eliminating grinding poverty while attempting to overcome the Great Depression. It is not beyond reasonable speculation that JKG would want at least one of his sons to follow in his intellectual footsteps. And so Jamie would become the crown prince of JKG’s explanations for how the American Industrial System actually worked.
If you read James’ memoir below, you will see that he got a training that was the product of JKGs best ideas. Harvard AND Yale. Professors with international reputations and probably a friend of the family. A “visiting scholar” appointment at Brookings when it was still relevant. And finally he wound up at University of Texas—Austin. This school had enthusiastically embraced all the neoliberal rationalizations in its school of economics so of course, young Jamie would not be welcomed there. However, UT-Austin had long been home to the best Institutionalists in the land led by the spectacular
Clarence Ayres. Their wisdom was no longer welcome in the economics department either but they knew a fellow creature of the New Deal so gave him the job of
Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.
The career contrasts between JKG and James are extremely interesting. JKG was by the end of the 1960s arguably the most famous face the economics profession would ever have. His books were read in dozens of countries. He wrote for Henry Luce’s
Fortune magazine. He taught at Harvard and had acolytes all over the world. His 10-part video series on economics called
The Age of Uncertainty (some episodes can be found on
YouTube) was co-produced by the CBC, BBC and PBS. His breed of economic thought was accepted as the rational middle because the practitioners had done a mostly excellent job of running things—post-WW II reconstruction being the best example.
By comparison, James had a modest career that was useful. The man did not waste his life. But he was not the titan like his father—mostly because he had about 1/100 the opportunities to do a good job. In my humble opinion, the factor that explains this most simply was the change in
zeitgeist. The economic theories of JKG had ceased to be cool. Where I come from, the enlightened, passionate Keynesians who had run the economics department at the University of Minnesota since the glory days of
Alvin Hansen in the 1920s had long since forgotten the reason why Hansen was so enthusiastic about activist government economic intervention. Where he came from (Viborg South Dakota) such economic policy was literally a matter of life and death. This passion also informed JKG.
But Jamie did not grow up on a working farm, he grew up in a splendid home large enough to entertain a steady stream of guests eager to swap ideas with the leading light of what was coming to be called Keynesianism. Jamie's childhood economic demonstrations taught him that economics was this delightfully difficult problem to be solved, not a dangerous test against arctic-like winters and you must be clever enough to still have food in the spring.
Jamie's also suffered wrong intellectual turns even (or especially) considering his gee-whiz educational paths. Economics was changing through the addition of computing power. The math geeks would pose the big questions for the high-powered mainframes to crunch and suddenly, the great mysteries would be revealed through the statistical wisdom of regression analysis. Analysis as modeling guided by machine-perfect math sure sounds like a good idea.
Personally, I was not impressed. I wasted much of my youth building model airplanes and learned a profound lesson. The reason that model airplanes don't look or fly like real airplanes is that all sorts of problems are introduced when you try to scale the outcome. There are guys who want their scale models so authentic, they even want the rivets in the right place. Unfortunately, if the rivets get too small, they no longer can work as fasteners so they are reduced to decoration. Worse, there are physics problems that cause small airplanes to fly differently than large planes. For example, the governing bodies who make the rules for judging scale models have modified those rules so that models are still considered authentic even if the tail surfaces are oversized. Why? Because a WW II fighter with accurately-sized tail surfaces will barely fly—if at all. Oh those
Reynolds numbers.
Then there are the problems of predicting behavior using mathematical formulas. Try, for example, to animate the walking behavior of a small toddler in a 3D animation. Using math formulas to predict such random behavior is virtually impossible. In fact, realistic cartoon behavior is really only possible if one puts markers on a real child, let him walk across the floor, take those marker locations and attach them to the model and animate the result. And yet, there are economists from around the world who actually believe they can predict large-scale human motion like market behavior with a few elegant math formulas. I am reminded of that arrogance when I watch just how difficult it is to make a self-driving car. And this is an EASY problem. There are states in USA that issue driver's licenses to 15-year olds.
When Jamie Galbraith lists the learning experiences that were mostly a waste of time he includes learning matrix algebra. (See paragraph #4 below.) So essentially he learned the same lessons as I only in a Harvard classroom. Unfortunately, this mislearning sunk the whole econ profession for at least 50 years. Worse, because this mislearning was so difficult and time consuming, other necessary things had to be dropped. The most serious is the fact that one can now get an advanced degree in economics without knowing the history of the subject. It's no wonder that economists have gotten almost everything wrong for the past 50 years.
So here's to James K. Galbraith who devoted his life to recreating the methods employed by the economists who guided the industrialized west to the greatest prosperity in human history. Historians are important too.
