No Voice At All

JUST AS STUDENTS have their prototype of the "60s holdover," professors must surely have theirs. Undergraduates apply that label-with either derision or respect-to the fire-in-the-berlly jeans and t-shirt radical who does not register for the draft, who protests with signs and slogans in the street U.S. Involvement in El Salvador or Harvard's investments in South Africa, and who celebrates April 19, 1969-the day 400 students took over University Hall-as some sort of Bastille Day equivalent.

In academic, the ideology for this "type" is probably the same, but the style more refined and polished. He would probably be an informal advisor in Ted Kennedy, and he would carry the crusade against Reagonomics to the battlefields of "Firing Line" and The New York Review of Books. He might travel to France to participate in a conference on culture, where a major finding emerges that the American television series "Dallas" poses one of the greatest threats to advanced society. He could also publish an 80-page book entitled The Voice of the Poor.

It is admittedly a cheap shot to criticize Warburg Professor of Economics Emeritus John Kenneth Galbraith, on whom the above description is based, for being a "60s holdover. "He has been one of the nation's leading liberals since as far back as the late 40s, when his leftist leanings roused the Harvard Board of Overseas, for the first and last time, into trying to wield its merely symbolic power of halting tenure appointments. Furthermore, unlike less imaginative colleagues and students who simply emulate legends of that era, Galbraith actually helped shape his caricature's mold.

And yet it is fair to say that the former Ambassador to India and past president of the American Economic Association is now riding on the image and ideas which he generated during that time period. His current essays in economic and political persuasion, at least those in his most recent work, The Voice of the Poor, are as always smooth reading, but they are time-worn and unpersuasive.

THE TITLE SKIRTS the questions to whether Galbraith has appointed himself spokesman for those who have no voice of whether he is cataloguing the cry of the underprivileged. Neither interpretation actually applies to the content of the book, which in a very general way examines economic development. It is a revised version of a series of lectures given in India in the spring of 1982, which Galbraith ties together with sometimes tenuous theme that historical process-meaning the state of development-not ideology, should dictate what economic policy a country pursues.

The most insightful of the four short essays in the third, entitled "The Second Imperial Requiem, "Galbraith provides the not-so-new but always refreshing argument countering extremists on both sides of the spectrum who rally against U.S./U.S.S.R. neo-imperialism. He notes that an irrational reactionary rivalry between the two powers, not quest for world domination, dictates the sometimes dangerous foreign ventures, and that any such attempts at imperialism are doomed to failure. The reason is that self-determination governs the priorities of all nations, including those of the Third World, and that Eastern and Western dominance are equally repugnant. In one particular persuasive essay, he points out that "India, in one agitated American view is much under Soviet influence at the present time. [But] No mentally viable person can imagine that the Indians, having won their independence from the Indians, having won their independence from the British, would now sacrifice it to the Russians."

Galbraith elaborates on the illogical practices stemming from this futile superpower rivalry in two other essays. "The Constraints of the Historical Process," which looks at economic aid, and "The Military Nexus," which covers military aid. Both of these chapters argue that United States and Soviet Union assistance to the poorer countries are dictated not by the economic needs of the destitute receivers but by the rhetorical needs of the rhetorical needs of the prospering givers.

Industrial assistance, Galbraith says is too often geared at making an undeveloped country "capitalist" or "communist," as both advanced states "have taken what is appropriate to their own late stage of development and applied it automatically to the new nations which are in the earlier stages "He explains that Americans and Russians went through cultural and political development before developing economically, and that the poorer nations must do so as well before they can make use of industrial aid. His solution is not a decrease in aid, but a call for a shift from "capital" to "cultural" assistance, a concept he never explains.

Here Galbraith raises the intriguing question of just how exactly to share the world's wealth without creating disturbances, but his answers themselves are underdeveloped. He is infact, wrong that political development is a necessary prerequisite for economic development as fairly prosperous but repressive regimes in Chile Taiwan, and the Philippines demonstrate. And while most people can agree on what might constitute an advanced economy plentiful wealth fairly distributed-few can agree on what an advanced culture is. Non economic or cultural assistance would certainly create the headaches and the upheaval which the author tries to prevent.

GALBRAITH OFFERS a similarly simple observation and bankrupt solution to the problem of weapons proliferation. No one could deny his assertion that arms sales divert from much-needed expenditures on food and medicine. But his belief that such arms sales are the cause, and not the result of international rivalries, and that consequently Third World enemies can easily unite against the superpowers and boycott weapons, is deluded. He boldly asserts that "from the weapons flow come the resulting tensions and conflict between the recipients-between India and Pakistan, Iran and Iraq, Israel and the Arab lands, between different factions within Lebanon, on the Sahara, in Central America. "But that explanation overlooks cultural tensions and quests for self determination which proceeded the weapons flow, the Soviet Union or even the United States.

Galbraith's final chapter, "Historical Process and the Rich," is simply an updated rehash of his landmark book. The New Industrial State, in which he argues that the free market exists only in the minds of capitalist ideologues and that the economy, free of governments intervention, is controlled by large organizations-big business and trade unions. Since corporations plan out production and to some extent anyway, prices, he argues that government planning would only be a minor change and a great improvement over the current system. The most controversial of his proposals is the call for price and income policies or controls yet his defense in this essay is quite unconvincing. He notes that "much arguments to the contrary, a strong income and price policy served the United States well during the Second World War...it served again in the Korean War and for Richard Nixon...Each time, inflation resumed when the controls were lifted, but it is surely not an argument against a policy that it does not work when you do not have it. "The obvious retort is that prices are to some extent reflections of demand and the fact that they skyrocketed after the controls were lifted indicated drastic distortions when the limits were in place.

Though The Voice of the Poor is lacking in fresh answers of even intriguing questions. It does provide the one trait which always makes Galbraith a pleasure to read eloquence. Were he merely clear and concise he would certainly be superior to the vast majority of his economic colleagues. But his essays ingeniously express even old themes in a bright tune few political analysts can approach Note for example, his description of the dangers from the arms race.

There will be no freedom no democracy these were unknown in the medical existence not because they had set to be insented but because in a poverty hidden context they are irrelevant. None should doubt the ashes of capitalism will be indistinguishable by even the most perceptive surviving ideologue from the ashes of Communism.

Nonetheless in The Voice of Poor the analysis incomplete and the logic unconvincing. While easy to ready it will hardly inspire many to the half hearted rallying cry of its conclusion "books can point the way things happen when readers join the march.