Infirm in all but opinion
You either like JK Galbraith or you don’t. I met an American recently who said a plane journey had been wrecked by the professor’s stentorian tones echoing through the aircraft, but this morning at the Ritz he is among friends. The staff are suitably fawning this is the 43rd successive year he has stayed here but, more tellingly, a red-faced Irishman passing through the lobby as we photograph him stops, shakes him by the hand, professes admiration and gets his own little silver camera out to photograph the great man.
The great man is perched in a large armchair with, now, two photographers clucking and clicking round him while I hold his walking stick his vanity does not permit it to appear in the picture his vanity does not admit any infirmity, even in his 91st year. He is here to mark the UK publication of the 40th anniversary edition of The Affluent Society, to have lunch with Gordon Brown (something he tells me immediately), and to have coffee in the Ritz’s Palm Court dining room with me.
Or, rather, I drink coffee while he regales the entire room with his thoughts and his memories. And what memories: a hush descends and our fellow diners really are listening. Galbraith’s is one of those epic, century-spanning lives that, seen from the foothills you and I occupy, can only astonish. A confidant of Roosevelt and JFK, head of price control in the US during the second world war, ambassador to India in the early 60s when India and China were virtually at war, economist, controversialist, novelist, scourge of monetarism, patrician, pundit for six decades he has had the larger-than-life career that befits a man who stands 6ft 8in in his brogues.
As we speak, Roosevelt is still alive, the greatest president of all, the most profound influence on Galbraith’s life and on this American century. ‘He was the dominant figure in my generation,’ says Galbraith. ‘I was a much closer friend of JFK, who I knew from his college days on and loved, but the Great Depression and the second world war were two of the great events of the century and Roosevelt was the central figure in both. That gave him an identity for my generation beyond anybody else.’
Galbraith, then in his 30s and with a background as an academic economist, was put in charge of wartime price controls. ‘I started with a staff of seven and ended up with around 15,000,’ Galbraith recalls. ‘You could lower a price without my permission but you couldn’t raise one. In terms of power, my life has been downhill ever since.’
Not that the loss of real power bothered him too much. He preferred an academic base a professorship at Harvard, a stint at Cambridge (he retains dining rights at Trinity College), and a house in Switzerland ‘the only place in the world where you look at the telephone and hope that it will ring’ from where, over the past four decades, he has posted his heartfelt pleas for a world order based on sanity and humanity, rather than big business-dominated ideology.
The Affluent Society, and its 90s successor The Culture of Contentment, belie their titles their real concern is with the poor, the disadvantaged, the discontented, the victims of specious capitalism, the people with needs awash in a world concerned only with wants. Quite how that fits with 43 successive years at the Ritz is a tricky question one I can’t really steel myself to put to a slightly deaf, pressed-for-time legend but he does tell me (twice) that way back the Ritz was recommended to him by the socialist John Strachey. So that’s OK.
Galbraith was born into a farming community in Canada. He says that background gave him ‘a powerful aversion to any form of manual toil’ and he is certainly not inclined to celebrate the dignity of labour or mythologise the struggles of the proletariat. His father was a leading figure in western Ontario’s liberal party, and Galbraith says he grew up under his influence. After college in Canada, he won a scholarship to the University of California and never returned north.
The Affluent Society (published in 1958 in the US) made him one of the first media academics, helped by his elegant prose style (he calls it a ‘fatal fluency’), his desire to embrace a popular audience, and his willingness to deal in big ideas. His success, arrogance and love of the well-turned generalisation and headline-catching phrase did not endear him to his fellow academics.
‘There is a view both in Britain and the US that if you write for, or are accepted by, a large audience, you’re writing for the masses rather than for your scholarly peers and that you compromise your scientific values. That danger does exist, but I have always thought it was possible to write intelligently for the public.’
He has written a new introduction to The Affluent Society and made occasional changes to the text, but on the whole he stands by what he wrote at the onset of the consumer age. ‘One looks over a book of this sort with a certain deference: most things I still applaud, but there are some which I have quietly changed. I still stand very strongly by the notion that the residual problem of affluence is local poverty, particularly in the big cities. The basic notion that the affluent society expands the production of private well-being, of private goods and services, more readily than it does public goods and services, and that there is a major discrimination against environmental concerns, is now more evident, however, and far more evident in the US than in Britain.’
The book’s insights into the way that modern society juxtaposes private affluence and public squalor, the concern for environmentalism, and the portrayal of an institutionalised selfishness among the well-off (echoed in The Culture of Contentment in 1992) all anticipated later political preoccupations. When monetarism swept the world in the 80s, Galbraith took to the academic barricades to defend the Keynesian legacy, in books and essays, letters and lectures all laced with elegance and wit, humanity and common sense. Why, he asked, did monetarists think the rich should be given more money as an incentive to work harder, while the poor should receive less to achieve the same result?
Did he feel frozen out at the height of the Reagan-Thatcher hegemony? ‘I can honestly tell you that I have never felt frozen out when I’ve seen the wrong policy.’ How does he rate Clinton? ‘Much to be preferred to Ronald Reagan’ is the characteristically dry response. Should he have been more radical? ‘I would like to see a much stronger health programme, a stronger anti-poverty programme, and a stronger stand against the grave inequality in the US.’ Could that liberal agenda ever be sold to the tax and big government-hating electorate in the US? ‘I don’t think so, but there are times when one adheres to unpopular positions because they are true.’
And with that he is off to meet the chancellor, leaving the Palm Courters to their tea and thickly buttered toast, while outside the snarling traffic banks up along Piccadilly.
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