BOOKSHELF | SEPTEMBER 25, 2010
The Non-Economist's Economist
John Kenneth Galbraith avoided technical jargon and wrote witty prose — too bad he got so much wrong.
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By JAMES GRANT
wsj.com
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Reading List: If Not Galbraith, Who?
Maury Klein tells a great story in "Rainbow's End: The Crash of 1929" (Oxford, 2001), but he also attempts to answer the great question: What went wrong? For the financial specialist in search of a tree-by-tree history of the forest of the Depression, look no further than Barrie A. Wigmore's "The Crash and Its Aftermath: A History of the Securities Markets in the United States, 1929-33" (Greenwood Press, 1985).
In the quality of certitude, the libertarian Murray Rothbard yielded to no economist. His revisionist history, "America's Great Depression" (available through the website of the Mises Institute), contends that it was the meddling Hoover administration that turned recession into calamity. Amity Shlaes draws up a persuasive indictment of the New Deal in her "The Forgotten Man" (HarperCollins, 2007).
"Economics and the Public Welfare" by Benjamin Anderson (Liberty Press, 1979) is in strong contention for the lamest title ever fastened by a publisher on a deserving book. Better, the subtitle: "A Financial and Economic History of the United States: 1914-1946."
"Where are the Customers' Yachts? Or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street," by Fred Schwed Jr. (Simon & Schuster, 1940) is the perfect antidote for any who imagine that the reduced salaries and status of today's financiers is anything new. Page for page, Schwed's unassuming survey of the financial field might be the best investment book ever written. Hands-down, it's the funniest.
An unfunny but essential contribution to the literature of the Federal Reserve is the long-neglected "Theory and Practice of Central Banking" (Harper, 1936) by Henry Parker Willis, the first secretary of the Federal Reserve Board. Willis wrote to protest the against the central bank's reinvention of itself, quite against the intentions of its founders, as a kind of infernal economic planning machine. He should see it now.
Freeman Tilden's "A World in Debt" (privately printed, 1983) is a quirky, elegant, long out-of-print treatise by a non-economist on an all-too-timely subject. "The world," wrote Tilden in 1936, "has several times, and perhaps many times, squandered itself into a position where a total deflation of debt was imperative and unavoidable. We may be entering one more such receivership of civilization."
If the Obama economic program leaves you cold, puzzled or hot under the collar, turn to Hunter Lewis's "Where Keynes Went Wrong" (Axios Press, 2009) or "The Critics of Keynesian Economics," edited by Henry Hazlitt (Arlington House, 1977).
—James Grant |
