Economics in Perspective: A Critical History, by John Kenneth Galbraith (Houghton Mifflin, 324 pp„ $19.95)
John Kenneth Galbraith could not write without partisan lust, and would not strive to. In consequence the reader searching after disinterested reflections on the impact of historical circumstance on economic theory will be tempted to skip One More by JKG. This would be a mistake. Whatever in the book one elects to discard as tendentious (e.g., that the Greeks owned slaves did not remove Greek slaves—or slave owners—from market forces), or to question as dogmatically motivated (the jettisoning of Say’s Law leaves a clutter all Galbraith’s horses and men can’t quite put right), one is free happily so to discard. But it is a mistake to forgo this exposure to Galbraith’s wit and clarity. Even if the book were merely a series of paragraphs, separated by typographical dividers, wholly designed to explicate economic events and economic pseudoevents, economists and economists manqués, economic laws and economic fictions, and the difficulty in distinguishing between them, Economics in Perspective would be worth reading, and deploying permanently in one’s reference library. Its thesis, reduced, is that there are no laws of economics, there are only economic mores, and they are expressions of historical circumstance; and if your intelligence inclines to the socialist perspective, you are intelligent. Economics as Anthropology, the book might have been entitled. Whatever, it is the most readable Galbraith since his Ambassador’s
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