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Consider the banality of modern-day evil: As Jeffrey Sachs reminds us in his new book, eight million impoverished men, women and children are condemned to death each year -- not by terrorists or a modern-day Hitler or Stalin, but by you, the reader of this article, by me, and by every other literate and prosperous person in the West.- Richard Parker, The New York Observer Ken Galbraith, who passed away April 29, 2006, in Cambridge at age 97, was a warm and influential friend to generations of Nieman Fellows. Over the years, he met with fellows more often than anyone else and, it is fair to say, these conversations were among the highlights of their time at Harvard.
- Nieman Foundation JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH, the Harvard economist, diplomat, and author of nearly four dozen books, loved words--especially his own, but no less those about him. So it's too bad that he's not here to correct so many of the hundreds of articles about him that have appeared since he died last weekend at the age of 97. As his biographer, I was sorry for him, too, that so many admirers and detractors alike miscast him as the last of a dying breed: "a liberal," "a Keynesian economist," or "an apostle of 'big government.'" That's not who he was at all, at least not as those terms are used today.
- Richard Parker, The Boston Globe Over at Foreign Affairs, Brad DeLong has a very nice review of Richard Parker's John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics. Here is his summary of Parker's explanation for why the Democratic party no longer has the energy to embrace Galbraithian politics and economics:Too many party intellectuals and politicians drink cocktails on Martha's Vineyard, in Parker's view, and too few spend time on the shop floor learning what issues are important to those sweeping up or manning an assembly line or tending the convenience-store cash register from midnight to six am. Thus, the mass base of the Democratic Party has withered, and without a mass base Democratic politicians listen too much to their rich contributors and turn into Eisenhower Republicans - people who are interested above all in balancing the budget.
- Kevin Drum, The Washington Monthly 'AS THIS IS written, American liberals have made scarcely a new proposal for reform in 20 years. It is not evident that they have had any important new ideas. Rather, they have had a file. Little is ever added. Platform making consists, in effect, in emptying out the drawers."
- Richard Parker, Los Angeles Times Ken Galbraith loved words, not least his own. He was no less fond, and no less generous in praise, of writers who took the craft of writing as seriously as he. Galbraith, despite his seeming fluency, was not a "natural" writer. The appearance of ease and spontaneity he treasured emerged, he often said, only after the fifth draft.
- Richard Parker, The Toronto Globe and Mail When John Kenneth Galbraith died this past weekend, to many it seemed the end of an era. Born in 1908 when Teddy Roosevelt was president and the first Model T's were just rolling off the assembly line, Galbraith lived during virtually every major event of the 20th century.
- Richard Parker, Salon.com He met Prof. Galbraith at Harvard and decided to write about the Canadian economist's impact as a thinker, but also to chronicle 75 years of U.S. economic history, with its wildly variant, and mostly buried, theologies from supply-side to Laffer Curves or George W. Bush's expansive tax-cuts-with-overspending agenda.
- Diane Francis, National Post
