Galbraith saw people who were easily manipulated by savvy corporations and slick advertising campaigns, who had no real idea of what they wanted, or why. Other economists believed that consumers were rational, calculating actors, whose demands and tastes were deserving of the utmost deference. Instead of atomistic individuals and firms, he saw behemoth corporations instead of the free market, a quasi-planned economy. He took generally accepted ideas about the economy and turned them upside down. He was a satirist of economics almost as much as a practitioner of it. (The volume is edited by Galbraith’s son James, also an economist.) Galbraith delighted in puncturing the self-importance of his profession. This makes the publication of the Library of America edition of four of Galbraith’s best-known books- American Capitalism The Great Crash, 1929 The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State-a cause for celebration. Its central theme of the superiority of free markets is the gospel of political life. Its methods now dominate much of the social sciences, having made inroads in law and political science. It is also more intellectually and politically ascendant than it was in the 1930s.

Today, given the rise of mathematical methods and computer modeling, economics is if anything even more labyrinthine, esoteric and inaccessible to the layman than it was in the days of Keynes and Galbraith.

Galbraith the great crash