John Kenneth Galbraith :: essays research papers

                behind Kenneth GalbraithThe Canadian-born, Berkeley-trained John Kenneth Galbraith has been considered by legion(predicate) as the "Last American Institutionalist". As a result, Galbraith has remained something of a renegade in modern economics - and his work has been cryptograph if not provocative. In the 1950s, he presented economics with two tracts that needled the mainstream one maturation a theory of price control (which arose out of his wartime experience in the Office of Price Administration) which he argued for as an anti-inflation policy (1952) the second, American capitalist economy (1952), which argued that American post-war success arose not out of "getting the prices right" in an orthodox sense, but rather of "getting the prices wrong" and allowing industrial submersion to develop. It is a formula for growth because it enables technical innovation which might other th an not been done. However, it can only be regarded as successful provided in that respect is a "countervailing power" against potential abuse in the form of trade wind unions, supplier and consumer organizations and government regulation. Many set about since argued the formula for East Asian success later in the century was based precisely on this combination of oligopolistic power and "countervailing" institutions. It was his smallish 1958 book, The Affluent Society, that earned Galbraith his popular reknown and skipper emnity. Although the thesis was not astoundingly new - having long been argued by Veblen, Mitchell and Knight - his ardour on the myth of "consumer sovereignty" went against the cornerstone of mainstream economics and, in many ways, the culturally hegemonic "American way of life". His New Industrial give in (1967) spread out on Galbraiths theory of the firm, arguing that the orthodox theories of the perfectly free-enterprise( a) firm fell far short in analytical power. Firms, Galbraith claimed, were oligopolistic, main(a) institutions vying for market share (and not profit maximization) which wrested power away from owners (entrepreneurs/shareholders), regulators and consumers via accomplished means (e.g. vertical integration, advertising, product differentiation) and unconventional ones (e.g. bureaucratization, capture of semipolitical favor), etc. Naturally, these were themes already well-espoused in the old American Institutionalist literature, but in the 1960s, they had been patently forgotten in economics. The issue of "political capture" by firms was expanded upon in his 1973 Economics and the Public Purpose. But new themes were added - notably, that of public education, the political process and stressing the provision of public goods. Although often not acknowledging it explicitly, many economists have since pursued themes raised by Galbraith.