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A Journey Through Economic Time: A Firsthand View

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I like the early parts of this book best. John Kenneth Galbraith has been an economist with first-hand experience in a lot of areas: Canadian Scotch farmers, the big stock market crash, wage and price controls, post-war economic assessment of strategic bombing, post-war aid, Keynesian stimulation of economic demand, the political views of businessmen, but people who read this book are most likely to notice how fond he is of economic programs which benefit the less fortunate at the expense of those who are most comfortable with things as they are. Though published in 1994, this book praises Social Security as a miraculously successful program passed in 1935, based initially on benefits "at distinctly modest, even primitive levels, old age pensions" (p. 93), though opponents might complain. "An Ohio Chamber of Commerce official of strong historical bent found that similar measures had brought the fall of Rome." (p. 94). Ohio??? The state and the United States are still evenly divided on which way to head politically when economic matters are paramount, but any benefit that does not increase to reflect increases in salary levels is likely to seem primitive in this century.

I once studied antitrust laws for a few years, with excellent instruction from some of the top professors, but it is not surprising that this knowledge rarely brings me riches or even meaningful employment since conflicts of interest can be a bar to active involvement. As a legal topic, it is like trying to apply philosophy to promote freedom. As Galbraith puts it,

"For liberals in this time the antitrust laws were a comprehensive economic therapy. Given any evident misuse of market power, more broadly any defective economic performance, the answer was clear: enforce the antitrust laws. This, then and later, became, on frequent occasion, the ready recourse of the devoid liberal mind." (p. 48).

"These were not repealed; they were simply not enforced. This was, save by the lawyers involved, one of the less noticed developments of the Reagan years." (p. 49).

Galbraith's memory of the Reagan years must have been fresh when he wrote of that triumph for the view that "The domestic threat was the federal government, and specifically its power of taxation as this might be used on behalf of those outside the favored community." (p. 211). The surprising thing about A JOURNEY THROUGH ECONOMIC TIME by John Kenneth Galbraith is how often he can identify policies which have changed drastically in the last century. (Surtax rates went up to 65 percent on incomes over $1,000,000 in 1918. (p. 26)). Some steps even thwarted the rich hoards of previously inflated currencies.

"The obvious solution was to diminish the regular currency outstanding by requiring the exchange of the existing notes for a smaller but functionally effective number. This, with characteristic pragmatism, the French did in the early months after the war. It had the further practical effect of denying to erstwhile black-market operators and those who had enjoyed special privileges under the collaborationist Vichy government any continuing advantage from their previous political reward; it was not wise to confess guilt by bringing in a currency hoard for exchange." (p. 143).

World War II was unusual in that the economics of warfare had been refined to produce as much wealth as possible for the middle class in America, as young economists who had been working in the New Deal were sure to appreciate. Galbraith was sure that his efforts controlling wages and prices had resulted in the greatest possible expansion of production.

"As the demands of war procurement converged on the economy, there were two possible designs for enhancing return, for increasing profits. One was to raise prices; the other was to expand production. The price controls and associated wage restraints made the increase of production the only available course. Profit maximization, not a subordinate goal in wartime, was served horizontally by more production, not vertically by higher prices. Though not greatly noticed at the time, the price and wage controls had a strongly functional role in expanding wartime production." (pp. 117-118).

I can remember when people who did not have oil wells complained that the only way to get rich was to have an oil well, because a depletion allowance in the income tax system allowed oil well owners to keep more of the money they made. The top tax rate was over 90 percent during World War II, after having been cut by President Hoover to avoid a depression:

"A taxpayer with an income of $5,000, a very comfortable return in those days, had his or her tax cut by two-thirds. It went from $16.88 to $5.63. Someone with $10,000, roughly the equivalent of $100,000 today, saw his tax go from $120 down to $65." (p. 78).

The federal budget was a few billion then. The previous war had been a significant expense, and John Kenneth Galbraith waits until Chapter 4 of this book to join with John Maynard Keynes (THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE) in an attempt to show that political views which settled in the minds of the negotiators of the Peace Treaty at the end of the Great War of 1914-1918 were an economic catastrophe. Money works best when people spend it for things they need, and most unpredictably when it is borrowed in dire distress and never repaid. "President Calvin Coolidge was adamant in expressing the reputable economic mood of the time: `They hired the money, didn't they?' " (p. 32).

"Besides destroying a political and economic structure that had long been in place, the war reshaped for all ensuing time the relationship between nations great and small, rich and impoverished. . . . The First World War was, indeed, rightly called the Great War; World War II was its last battle." (p. 10).

After the first world war the old world order begin to collapse.The great powers were no longer real great powers and then a new world order begin to form.This book gives you a realistic point of view about the whole economic events after WW1 till the end of communism.Reading this book also teaches the close contact between economy and the future of earth by showing us the collapsing empires,ideas and utopias because of economy.

Like everyone else in these days of financial alarm, I've been reading books on economics. Unfortunately much of what has been issued recently (e.g., Panic! by Michael Lewis) appears hastily thrown together to make a quick buck, so I've turned instead to the books already on my shelf. I don't seem to have finished "A Journey Through Economic Time" when I obtained it in the '90s, and on my second attempt through, the reason became obvious.

Why is is that members of certain professions seem unable to write in clear, plain and precise English? Economists, music critics, psychologists and other such quacks must all take some sort of blood oath never to write coherently, and I am flabbergasted at the accolades the late Professor Galbraith has received over the years. I suppose I could describe struggling through Professor Galbraith's turgid prose as tedious, but it's far worse than that; it's frequently painful, and I offer a few sentences as examples.

"Even by conservatives monopoly could not systematically be defended."
[pg.48]
Forget for the moment that in English, the adverb goes after the verb. (Galbraith doesn't write in English, so I guess the standard rules don't apply to him.) Isn't the syntax that sentence of which all wrong? (Whups! Now I'm doing it!) Here are others:

"I here, on occasion, retrieve what I've said before." [pg.52]
Do I have to explain to you why "on occasion" makes no sense and is completely superfluous in that sentence? Even if the offending prepositional phrase were removed, "I here retrieve what I've said before," would be awful. A normal person (of average intelligence or higher) would simply write, "As I've said before," but that would be too simple for Professor Galbraith.

"In Germany this commitment to rigorously orthodox finance was to extend into the 1930s under Chancellor Heinrich Brüning and make even more painful the Great Depression." [pg.52]

"There is a larger point here: no more than would President George Bush sixty years later did President Hoover like a depression or recession." [pg.80]

"They had developed new national accounts -- National Income and Gross National Product, present and potential -- and thus shown what war production was possible." [136]

"That the individual in the market system so pursues self-interest the classically devout conservative must, in all faith, concede." [pg.203]

"The recollection of the Reagan presidency would not have been of its last seven fat years." [pg.235]

Despite its topic, this is not a difficult book. Instead, it is a painful book to read, as such awkward syntax assails the retina and makes the optic nerve nervous. Why did the late Professor Galbraith write such tortured prose? I offer the following speculation:
1.) Galbraith was never able to completely abandon his native Scots farm dialect.
2.) That's what passes for English among economists.
3.) Galbraith actually did know English, but he chose to write in a pseudo-Elizabethan style so as to lend his books an intellectual cachet -- to try and fancy-up the language by making it awkward.

I suspect this last to be accurate. By 1994, the ever-changing winds of economic thought had shifted away from his baroque advocacy of wage-and-price controls and gasoline rationing in the 1970s [pg. 193], and Galbraith was thus held in low esteem even by such liberal economists as Paul Krugman, who dismissed him as a "policy entrepreneur" and "media personality." Attempting to write in the style of Beowulf was, I believe, Galbraith's way of trying to strike a loftier intellectual pose. (Another reviewer here called Galbraith's prose "elegant.")

Even worse than the graceless syntax is how Professor Galbraith casually rewrites history if it suits his thesis that he was always right, and everything that the Republicans ever did was catastrophic to the commonweal. As everyone knows, the double-digit inflation of the late 1970s was stopped dead when Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker put a stranglehold on the money supply by raising the prime rate. But in Galbraith's version, it was instead the mischief of the Reagan administration: "More general in its effect was what the new administration did as to monetary policy. The latter [the later what?] . . . was tightened rigorously in 1981 and 1982." [pg.216] But Volker (whose name is never mentioned) was appointed by President Carter (in August, 1979), so how was the Reagan administration responsible? Galbraith seems not to have been concerned about inflation, and he states preposterously, "There are also the large number living on Social Security or pensions . . . . Inflation is then less of a threat to the many with fixed incomes." [pg. 237]

Economists are the high priests of Mammon, and every one of them I've read is every bit as dogmatic as any of the sacred clergy. Galbraith was no exception, and he wrote no better than the laissez-faire zealots.

"On page 191 appaernetly he feels it was the "perverse genius" of Richard Nixon to make Americans distrust government through such actions as Watergate." Stacy Redding ..........actually i have heard several peaople atribute watergate to being a plot "to make Americans distrust government." ...And it was also one of the most influencual impacts of water gate... And if you put this scenerio into a propper historical context it dosnt cmopletely not make sense.

"For example, Does JKG really beleive that Watergate was a plot by Nixon to get Joe Sixpack to distrust government" stacy redding

Actually several authors have also held this view

The journey through economic times does not begin with the beginning of recorded history, but in the late middle ages. JKG then fastforwards over the next 8 pages to WW1. For the first half of half of the rest of the book JKG indecisively meanders between a left leaning history, mostly of the US, and his own personal experiences in government jobs and at various schools. By the second half of the book he has apparently made up his mind it is to be a story about the underprivileged and their holier than thou defenders, most notably JKG himself, against the evil ambitions of the comfortable class. An example on page 174 of a conspiracy of the comfortable class to keep the poor down with a tax cut rather than increased social spending consisted in part of the members of the State Department having a "Galbraith Early Warning System" to warn other members of the comfortable class cabal of the times when JKG was returning from India to save the country from the tax cut. On page 191 apparently he feels it was the "perverse genius" of Richard Nixon to make Americans distrust government through such actions as Watergate. The writing is unclear and confusing throughout the entire book. For example, does JKG really believe that Watergate was a plot by Nixon to get Joe Sixpack to distrust government, or does JKG just have extreme difficulty stringing a few words together into a coherent whole? I still do not know.
When I began reading this I tried to think of a more pathetic attempt at a book on economics that I read in my life. After many remembrances of the many economic books that I have read I was able to think of one in which I only made it through a few chapters. In it some author I do not recall the name of used long term technical analysis to predict a global depression in the late 1980s through the 1990s. Several more chapters into the Galbraith book I changed my mind, this was worse than the book by the false profit of doom.
While I feel that most economics books are woefully lacking in statistics this has to be the worse of the lot. In the rare event that there is a statistic it is more of an inept and incomplete attempt to convince the reader of something than provide actual information.
On the positive side, in my exhaustive search throughout this entire tome (it is not really all that long-it just feels that way) I was able to find a single quasi interesting albeit incomplete sentence on income distribution on page 134.
With writing like this how does Harvard do so well in the rankings?