Age of Uncertainty, The: A History of Economic Ideas and Their Co by Galbraith, John Kenneth
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John Kenneth Galbraith who was born in 1908, is the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics Emeritus at Harvard University and a past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the distinguished author of thirty-one books spanning three decades, including The Affluent Society, The Good Society, and The Great Crash. He has been awarded honorary degrees from Harvard, Oxford, the University of Paris, and Moscow University, and in 1997 he was inducted into the Order of Canada and received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2000, at a White House ceremony, he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Were these dirty jokes in the television version?,
By
This review is from: Age of Uncertainty (Hardcover)
John Kenneth Galbraith was nearing retirement when he spent three years preparing a television series on economics with the BBC. THE AGE OF UNCERTAINTY is the book prepared as a companion. Galbraith's book, MONEY: WHENCE IT CAME, WHERE IT WENT (1975) was also published while the television series was being prepared, and attempts to cover material that coincides with Chapter 6, The Rise and Fall of Money in THE AGE OF UNCERTAINTY. As America has become a financial empire second to none in the global economy, economics and politics seem to be joining to form a consensus similar to the situation in Paris in 1719. `It is to that year that we owe the useful French word "millionaire." ' (p. 172).People who are familiar with the kind of balance currently thought necessary for public television in the United States might be surprised at how negatively Galbraith is able to spin the lessons he finds at the end of previous prosperities, like "There was no way to go but down, and presently this became evident." (p. 172). Galbraith also displays a tremendous amount of pleasure in pointing out contributions made by the Scotch economists, Adam Smith, David Dale, and Robert Owen who, "In time, the work day for children was reduced to ten and a half hours, and children under twelve were never employed. It's an indication of how things were elsewhere that this was considered lenient. Because of his compassion Owen was always in trouble with his partners. They would have much preferred a tough, down to earth manager who would get a day's work out of the little bastards." (p. 30). John Law, son of an Edinburgh goldsmith, established the Banque Royale in Paris in 1716, taking "over the debts of the Regent and of the realm." (p. 170). For a few years, everyone expected the bank's notes to be paid by silver and gold from "all the land north from the Gulf of Mexico to Minnesota and east from the Rockies to the Alleghenies." (p. 172). The Mississippi Company had absolute title to the territory, sold stock, and "Government creditors who were paid off in the notes then rushed to buy stock in the Banque Royale or in the Mississippi Company. From the money so invested more could be lent to the government, yet more notes could go out and yet more stock could be sold. It was a complete closed-circle system for recycling worthless paper." (p. 172). At the companies headquarters, "Those who got inside asked Law to sell them stock. Women investors, the histories tell, offered themselves as an added inducement. This must have been an unprecedented experience for someone from Scotland." (p. 172). As a companion book, not everything it contains was shown on television, and Galbraith might be exceeding the good taste of his presumed television audience when he records in print, "But nothing could disguise the elementary fact that the Banque Royale could not pay, that the notes were now worthless. Law only narrowly escaped Paris with his life. Parisians got what pleasure they could from a song that recommended that the paper be put to the most vulgar possible use." (p. 174). The Vietnam war appears a few times in this book, which was not published until Americans had been evacuated from Nam and Cambodia. After a picture of corpses and vultures in India, 1946, on page 128, an armed American is shown standing on the American embassy wall in Vietnam in 1975 as a dozen Vietnamese attempt to climb the wall by pulling themselves up on barbed wire that previously was strung over the heads of people on the sidewalk outside the embassy. Through the years when America entered the fight for free enterprise and freedom in Asia, and then television made it easy to see, Nam gets mentioned as a digression from purely economic considerations, for the benefit of a political system that, "In Vietnam we governed or sought to govern through Diem, Ky, and Thieu; they were not called princes, sultans or chiefs but freely chosen rulers." (pp. 130-131). Further thoughts on Vietnam appear in Chapter 8, The Fatal Competition, which starts with Eisenhower warning about the military-industrial complex in 1961, and a high official of the Department of State telling Galbraith in 1974, "To understand this world you must know that the military establishments of the United States and the Soviet Union have united against the civilians of both countries." (p. 227). I take particular interest in Nam because it served as a worst case test for what people were willing to think about American society in the years that created great uncertainty on a personal level. When Galbraith came back from India in October, 1962, "I went to the theater one evening with President and Mrs. Kennedy. . . . He told me, with much feeling, of the recklessness of the advice he had received during the crisis. The worst, he said, was from those who were afraid to be sensible." (p. 248). "Kennedy sent me to Vietnam in the autumn of 1961. A report from Maxwell Taylor and Walt W. Rostow had urged greater involvement, including troops. (They would be disguised, rather imaginatively, as flood control workers.) Kennedy was distressed and guessed I might have a different view." (p. 334). It is almost too much to ask an author to risk being remembered as a supporter of a poet-politician, but look: "Of all the men I've known in politics, Eugene McCarthy had the most subtle mind and by far the greatest sense of the music of words. He was, indeed, the first serious poet in the American political pantheon. In speaking for his nomination in Chicago, I said this might not yet be the age of John Milton but it was no longer the age of John Wayne or John Connally. . . . delegates sitting near, . . . jumped to their feet and proposed sexual violence on Connally." (p. 335).
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Galbraith at his Best,
By Sigourney Street (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Age of Uncertainty (Hardcover)
By the time he had written this book, Galbraith was well known for his wit and this book shows him off at his best. Essentially covering the history of money, finances and economics, he concisely boils down the subject matter making it easy to understand and delightful to read. From time to time he throws in his own political comments. Not quite light reading but definitely fun.
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