If further evidence is needed that economics remains a difficult subject practiced by men of only moderate literary grace, some examples offered later on in this essay should suffice. All the more praiseworthy, therefore, is the feat of John Kenneth Galbraith, professor of economics at Harvard, in producing in as many years three extraordinarily readable books: American Capitalism, Economics and the Art of Controversy, and The Great Crash. In the first of these, Mr. Galbraith advanced the challenging notion that free competition only poorly describes American markets for goods, labor services, and money. He found a better clue to the understanding of our economic life in the interaction of large, powerful business and labor organizations which limit each other’s power much as the United Automobile Workers narrows General Motors’ freedom to act, and Macy’s prevents the manufacturers of electrical appliances from charging what they might in the absence of Macy’s threat to produce the items itself. The central point which these examples illustrate is simple: the struggle between large units on different sides of the market tends to produce much the same sort of beneficial results as classical competition among hordes of small sellers—low prices, increasing economic efficiency, and wide variety. According to Mr. Galbraith, his colleagues’ pious attachment to anachronistic theory left them unable to explain the tremendous postwar boom, any more than the usual laws of aerodynamics can explain how the bumblebee flies (to use Mr. Galbraith’s own parallel). Thus provocatively stated, his argument convinced many of the intelligent general readers to whom it was addressed, at the same time as it started a continuing controversy with his professional critics.

Economics and the Art of Controversy, a little volume of lectures, is in every respect a slighter performance. Yet it too states a provocative thesis—that far more agreement between the two political parties in the United States exists on economic issues than the traditions of political rhetoric allow to appear. Politicians talk conflict since conflict is the stuff of election campaigns, but in truth their cries are echoes of the past. The practical experience of the last twenty years has convinced almost everyone, Democrat and Republican, that old-age assistance, minimum wages, public health measures, unemployment compensation—even the deliberate variation of taxes and government spending to counteract inflation or unemployment—are elementary procedures in a modern economy. The mock antagonists on both sides of the political fences have after all accepted the basic premise of the welfare state: that there are contingencies in the lives of all human beings and problems special to such groups as the fanners which justify, even demand, state intervention. Certainly the sight of the Congressional Democrats vainly seeking an economic issue with which to divide themselves from the Republicans supports Mr. Galbraith’s views, and may even suggest that the forensic lag he describes is being shortened.

Mr. Galbraith’s most recent performance is a dramatic account of the great crash of 1929, the events which preceded it, and the consequences which flowed from it. In form it is a chronicle of the genre practiced so successfully by the late Frederick Lewis Allen in Only Yesterday and Since Yesterday. In tone it is ironic, epigrammatic, and faintly monitory. Its author prefers to tell his tale of folly and chicanery as comedy, in which “nothing is being lost but money.” He plainly implies that contemporary stock market speculation may be re-enacting the same tired farce. He is probably even now preparing to review it.

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American Capitalism and The Great Crash have achieved large audiences, at least for works of non-inspirational exposition, and a certain fashion among literary critics. If we judge by the selections of the Readers’ Subscription, Mr. Galbraith has joined David Riesman as a favorite social scientist in the opinions of Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and W. H. Auden. It is not hard to see why. Mr. Galbraith’s fastidious English contrasts sharply with the homogenized prose of too many social scientists. His verbs are active and his images are precise. Joined to these attributes are brevity and genuine wit. When economists not rarely communicate their statistical discoveries to each other in a formidable passage of this kind:

Given the comparisons in Tables 3 and 4 based upon the mean deviations of actual from predicted industry outputs, it appears that projection methods using input-output tables are not very much better than quite elementary “naive” model methods. Indeed, the multiple regression forecasts seem to be somewhat better than those based, in part, upon input-output relations. In situations such as this, where “naive” models have in some sense to be taken seriously (e.g. if asked to forecast output by industry for, say, 1956, I would prefer Barnett’s multiple regression forecasts), it is well to keep in mind their purpose and character. They are not intended to be legitimate alternatives to the model or procedure being tested, but rather are designedly crude and inefficient things, almost reductio ad absurdum constructions of economic models and forecasting procedures. They represent a level of efficiency so low and so easily attained that any forecasting procedure proposed for operational use which cannot almost uniformly do better than they can must be rejected as unacceptable.”

—and share their theoretical insights in narratives like this one:

If the entrepreneur’s elasticity of expectations for commodity X is unity (changes in price are taken to be permanent), a rise in the current price of X will raise all expected prices of X in the same proportion. Now we discovered in statics that when the prices of a set of commodities change all in the same proportion, the set can be treated as a single commodity, and all rules of economic behavior can be applied to it as if it were a single commodity. So here. If the elasticity of expectations in unity, a rise in the price of X currently quoted on the market must raise the planned output of X taken as a whole; there is no opportunity for substitution over time, and so, from one point of view, the time factor can be neglected. The rules for the working of the production plan are exactly the same as the rules for a firm’s behavior in static conditions; there must be an increase in the output of X, brought about either by increased inputs of one sort or another, at one time or another, or by substitution at the expense of other products (now other products in the physical sense, not outputs of the same physical product at different dates).

—it is balm to the soul to read one or two excerpts from Mr. Galbraith:

As a year, 1929 has always been peculiarly the property of the economists. It was a year of notable economic events; indeed, in that year began the most momentous economic occurrence in the history of the United States, the ordeal of the Great Depression. In many ways this preoccupation with economics is unfortunate, for 1929 was a year of many marvels. In particular, it was one of those years that marvelously illuminate human motives and the very well-springs of human behavior. Historians and novelists have always known that tragedy wonderfully reveals the nature of man. But, while they have made rich use of war, revolution, and poverty, they have been singularly neglectful of financial panics. And one can relish the varied idiocy of human action during a panic to the full, for, while it is a time of great tragedy, nothing is being lost but money.

In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings. Like most humans, most of the time, they did some very foolish things. On the whole, the greater the earlier reputation for omniscience, the more serene the previous idiocy, the greater the foolishness now exposed. Things that in other times were concealed by a heavy facade of dignity now stood exposed, for the panic suddenly, almost obscenely, snatched this facade away. We are seldom vouchsafed a glance behind this barrier; in our society the counterpart of the Kremlin walls is the thickly stuffed shirt. The social historian must always be alert to his opportunities, and there have been few like 1929.

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Although there have been some other economists of like literary talent, few of them made original contributions to the theory of their subject. Mr. Galbraith can and does popularize not alone other men’s ideas, but his own as well. Can we think otherwise than that making difficult ideas accessible and even attractive is a fine thing? Thoughtful readers, untrained in economics but interested in public affairs, badly need an interpreter. Mr. Galbraith seems to be their man. Is it churlish to ask whether he is not too much their man? The two critical questions seem to be these: Is the reader beguiled by Mr. Galbraith’s literary gift into the belief that he understands a good deal more than fact or possibility permits? When he discusses his own ideas, does he convince his audience by the additional fact of default—the default of opponents who, though their arguments may be sounder, are less skillful in literary techniques?

I believe that the answers to these questions are affirmative. I propose to support these conclusions with evidence from the first and most important of the three volumes, American Capitalism. Let us see first how Mr. Galbraith presents other men’s theories. In clearing the decks for his own contribution, he summarizes the doctrine of free competition and also the Keynesian analysis of employment. How does he do it? He devotes just six pages to a description of free competitive markets, “the foundation of the faith,” draws not a single diagram, and quotes from just two economists, Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, the first outmoded and the second unrepresentative. No doubt these are excellent pages, which many teachers would accept for themselves as an accurate summary of the causes and consequences of competition. But, as the last sentence implies, they are pages of conclusions. Mr. Galbraith’s readers don’t really understand how a competitive market achieves equilibrium, nor do they as much as glimpse the analytical techniques which are at the heart of modem economics. Let me hasten to add that here is no charge of deception laid to Mr. Galbraith’s account; it is simply that the student must endure exercises a good deal more strenuous than the reading of a half-dozen pages of professional prose before he grasps the subtle mechanisms of the market. These remarks apply a fortiori to the equally compressed summary of Keynesian policy conclusions (which are by no means the conclusions of all Keynesians). Mr. Galbraith fails, not alone to describe the techniques which Keynes used in moving from premise to conclusion, but also to indicate just how controversial among economists many of these conclusions are. A proper intellectual conviction presupposes precisely the understanding the reader cannot derive from reading American Capitalism.

Although Mr. Galbraith has scrupulously erected guideposts which warn the unwary that these ideas are knotty (“Keynes’ General Theory could not normally be read, even by the intelligent layman, unless he was schooled in the language and, even more, in the abstractions of economics”), how can his readers help but believe that they have grasped a part at least of the true inwardness of economics? If what they have read is so clear, can the remainder be so difficult?

Fresh from his attack upon classical competition and his endorsement of Keynesian economics, Mr. Galbraith turns to his own concepts, which are an alternative to the doctrine he condemns and a supplement to the doctrine he approves. It is a good world that Mr. Galbraith describes, a world in which the great power resident in a few hands never persists long unchecked. Supplier limits manufacturer, unions employers, retailers wholesalers, and the Federal government, brooding over all, almost any overweening group. No need to take alarm, therefore, at the million-member union, the ten-billion-dollar corporation, or the clamorous farmers’ group, the many-branched food chain, and the reactionary trade association. Evil there may be, but it is evil rendered harmless by the power of countervailing evil. Thus the A & P, itself potent, fights the ordinary consumer’s battle against meat packers, the labor union the ordinary worker’s cause against the large employer, the public service commission the citizen’s complaint against the monopolistic utility. Surely these are appealing insights, not the less attractive because they exemplify the economic optimism of most Americans. Judging from the reactions of students, I should guess that they induce quick conviction.

But should they induce quick conviction? There is a strong opposition to Mr. Galbraith’s novel notions, but as far as the ordinary reader can guess, it does not exist. Here is a dangerous asymmetry. Mr. Galbraith has written for the general public. He has been answered by his fellow economists in learned journals, particularly in the far from lively pages of the American Economic Review, whose public is surely smaller than that of Women’s Wear Daily. These critics have alleged among much else that Mr. Galbraith has been forced to smuggle free competition back into his model at least in retail markets, that he ignores the possibility of collusion among the great contenders for power, and that his admission of the damaging effects of inflation upon the workings of his theory invalidates it in times like ours. I happen to believe that, on the whole, Mr. Galbraith’s critics have the better of the argument, but the rights and wrongs of this controversy are less important than the circumstance that it has occurred at all and that Mr. Galbraith’s audience, being innocent of its existence, accepts for want of an accessible alternative his side of the issue.

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All of this must seem cold comfort to the non-economist. The news that there is no short cut to genuine economic understanding undoubtedly parallels the word from the physicist that physics is terribly difficult, the warning from the doctor not to read medical journalism, indeed the solemn injunction from the specialist of every variety that his art is arcane and his secrets accessible only after proper rites of initiation. Is my simple message only a hope that Mr. Galbraith will write a textbook? I fear that this is so. There is in economics a legitimate place for the plain exposition, at some length, of generally accepted doctrines, and there are more of these than the professional scoffer at the social studies imagines. But experts should settle their controversies among themselves. The layman had best view with a wary eye the new doctrine addressed first to him, whatever its author’s credentials. This is the final, ungracious message I derive from three virtuoso performances by one of the most accomplished economists of his generation.

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