I've read several of his tomes from the 1960s and 1970s - including a good one on military spending that was written in about 1969 - and many of them are very prescient.The book Almost Everyone's Guide to Economics makes the very salient point (by Galbraith) that the fiction of the competitive market is just that. Our society by the 1970s (less so today, but still strongly so) had evolved to a point that was much more socialist than capitalist - and as a result the fiction that no one could exert control over the price of a good or service and that this control would be pervasive through the economy caused some dangerous policy dissonances in dealing with the inflationary spasms of that era.
Had people recognized that, by and large, the supply side of any market is more concentrated than the demand side, the logical solution would have been to regulate those sectors in order to prevent them from altering their prices at will.
In short, comprehensive income, price, profit and investment controls.
Reagan's answer was to go full speed in reverse and impart a much more free-market character to the US economy, but his policies actually went in retrograde by permitting even more mergers, paradoxically allowing even more monopoly pricing power than in the 1960s and 1970s.
But I digress.
Galbraith also amazes me due to his sheer longevity. The man is 93, and can no longer walk without the aid of crutches. Yet he retains a dignity and a poise in his writing and speaking that is the envy of people years younger than he (including me, I might add. 
)
Long live Galbraith, and may he win a Nobel before he dies.
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posted 16 July 2002 12:08 PM
