John Kenneth Galbraith died on Saturday at the grand old age of ninety seven. He was a child of his age though a generation ahead of his contempories and their conventional wisdom…a term he coined. Galbraith is the best-selling economist in the world…although with John Maynard Keynes as his mentor he was never eligible for the Ludwig Von Mises Nobel Prize in Economics awarded annually by the Swedish banking fraternity to Chicago University. But he should have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Galbraith once remarked in the lightly ironic and self-deprecating style that so delighted his readers that he always put his manuscripts through the typewriter three times…first for sense, second for style and third for both. It showed. He was the author of over forty books. His method was to sort out the wheat from the chaff of Economic History and Theory and to popularize what emerged without dumbing it down. My generation trusted Galbraith. In an age of increasingly dodgy dossiers this was quite something. To believe or not to believe. That is the question for Our Age.

At Ottakars in Ashford on Saturday I paid £16 for a copy of Dreamweaver MX 2004 for Dummies. I have been in Meads Bookshop on Lion Street after closing time learning how book sellers go online. ABE Books is one answer. But Bookdealer Magazine has been running negative editorials about the amount they take from book sellers…a sales commission of 8% and then another 6% by insisting that members used ABE Books own merchant services. Despite this I will be recommending to Clive Ogden the Proprietor of the Meads Book Service that he signs up with ABE Books for £ 17 per month…but also marks up his antiquarian book prices by 15% to cover their commissions. But Meads Book Service should also have a website of its own…with back office systems and database integration.

The best book on Keynes is by Michael Stewart…the long-forgotten Foreign Secretary in Harold Wilson’s administrations of the 1960s and 1970s. More than any other Labour politician he was responsible for ensuring that our generation never became embroiled in America’s disastrous Vietnam Debacle. For this alone I put Michael Stewart right up there with Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt and Edmund Blunden as one of the best of Christ’s Hospitals’ favourite sons. It was Tony Blair’s misfortune that he chose to surround himself with the Mandelssons and Campbells of this country’s political world instead of the Michael Stewarts and Michael Meachers of the Labour Party.

Keynes had said that there would be a time when society had to become accommodated to plenty rather than scarcity. Galbraith said this time had arrived and went on to argue that rather than constantly creating material wants through advertising the time had come to pay attention to the quality of life. The European Green Movement learned a lot from Galbraith’s liberalism...but he never believed in socialism as a method. For Galbraith socialism failed the only test that really mattered…the test of practical economics. Socialism didn’t and couldn’t work in the real world.

In Galbraith’s opinion American economists and politicians were still using the assumptions of a world of the past where poverty was nearly universal. He pointed out that America’s economy produced individual wealth but failed to address public needs. An oft-repeated Galbraithian phrase refers to Private Affluence in the midst of Public Squalor. He gave American liberals many of their sound-bites…and much of the language for debating issues of money, work and power. Galbraith revealed what other economists obscured by their obfuscating mathematical illiteracies…and uncovered what other politicians covered up by their rhetorical flourishes. By any measure he was a giant.

Planning is at the heart of what corporations do to create their managed markets and controlled oligopolies. Galbraith wanted Governments to do it too. Laissez-faire was never the Galbraith way…but nor was Soviet-style 5-year Planning. Galbraith had been in charge of Price Control in the Second World War and confessed afterwards that he knew the game was up when his enemies started to outnumber his friends. Galbraith wanted a better balance between the public and the private sectors. This is what he felt the Classical Economic Model fails to achieve.

One of my favourite Galbraithian remarks was his put-down of trickle-down theory so beloved of those of a right wing persuasion. ‘Trickle down theory,’ he wrote, ‘is the less than elegant metaphor that if one feeds the horse enough oats some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.’ Another was his remark that there are two sorts of forecaster: those who don’t know…and those who don’t know they don’t know.

Before the Hitler War the young Fritz Schumacher was a world-famous expert on International Finance. So it made sense for him to accompany John Kenneth Galbraith into Allied Occupied Germany in 1946. In my article The Schumacher Enigma I remarked that Schumacher had worked closely with Galbraith after the war. I have yet to read any reflections by Schumacher on this period in his intellectual development. But it may be significant that he rarely touched on International Finance in any published writings afterwards. I wonder what the Schumacher Archives have to say on his time in Germany with John Kenneth Galbraith?