China's GDP may be overstated.

[met]

I never heard that & Galbraith had a really good point there.

[Metacrock]

I never heard that & Galbraith had a really good point there.

I think it's a great truth that will never be out of date. It may be thought of as such now days. I don't know.

answering my own questoin I find that in 2006 his obit billed him as the man who popularized modern economics. They also said this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 0422.html

Dr. Galbraith was generally considered to have been an apostle of the theories advanced by British economist John Maynard Keynes: that government could promote full employment and a stable economy by stimulating spending and investment with adjustments in interest and tax rates, and deficit financing.

He lamented what he believed was an excess accumulation of private wealth at the expense of public needs, and he warned that an unfettered free market system and capitalism without regulation would fail to meet basic social demands. This was echoed in "The Affluent Society."

The Economist's View


http://economistsview.typepad.com/econo ... th_ga.html

Taken as a whole, Galbraith's major writings constitute both an attack on neoclassical economic thought and an analysis of modern capitalism. Nearly all of the characteristics of the institutionalist school apply to his many works.

The Conventional Wisdom

Galbraith is a critic of the neoclassical "conventional wisdom": a set of ideas that is familiar to all, widely accepted, but no longer relevant. His evolutionary approach explores changing conditions and examines the need to change our ideas to fit new situations. In a statement similar to that made by Veblen, Galbraith said, "Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaughts of circumstances with which they cannot contend." He is quick to point out that his attack is on the conventional wisdom, not on those who originally expounded the ideas:

The reader will soon discover that I think very little of certain of the central ideas of economics. But I do think a great deal of the men who originated these ideas. The shortcomings of economics are not original error but uncorrected obsolescence. The obsolescence has occurred because what is convenient has become sacrosanct.[16]

And how is it that these obsolete neoclassical ideas have been able to survive? Galbraith answers as follows:

The neoclassical system owes much to tradition - it is not implausible as a description of a society that once existed....

Additionally it is the available doctrine. Students arrive; something must be taught; the neoclassical model exists. It has yet another strength. It lends itself to endless theoretical refinement. With increasing complexity goes an impression of increasing precision and accuracy. And with resolved perplexity goes an impression of understanding."[17]

Within Galbraith's overall theory of modern capitalism one can find several specific theories that challenge orthodox economics. Two theories of particular importance are his notion of the "dependence effect" and his theory of the behavior of the firm.