A book by Ken Galbraith is an event to arouse high expectations.footnote¹ He is one of the very few writers in economics capable of combining exceptionally penetrating matter with a delicious manner—a quality which is less and less in evidence as teutonic turgidity is taken for scientific soundness, and mathematical short cuts for scholarly rigour. When a book by Galbraith is about the problem of development, this most complicated, least ‘determinate’ and entirely dynamical and politico-sociological field—in which economics proper can legitimately claim only a very small role—one looks forward with pleasurable anticipation to new insights.

I fear that the origins of this particular booklet, discussed deprecatingly and sensitively in the introduction, have somewhat affected its savour. It was the product, in the main, of Galbraith’s need to have lectures ready for his visits to the universities of India as us Ambassador there. It is, so to speak, his conventional wisdom that we are vouchsafed. Now I would prefer Galbraith’s conventional wisdom any day to the most ‘subtle’ ratiocinations of the majority of economists. He is quite unable to be boring, and very nearly unable to be conventional. But as he says: ‘The humour of college professors is almost invariably bad because they do not realize that students, who are both bored and anxious to flatter, will laugh at anything. What goes over in class then becomes their standard wit. The more general response to these lectures was subject to a similar discount: anything was better than what the long-suffering Indians had come to expect on such occasions. One should not assume anything very brilliant.’

A us ambassador, even a Galbraith—a conjunction not often experienced—must be discreet (though not quite as discreet as a British ambassador), and must conform (while again not quite as much as his British opposite number would). This is the penalty of fame and influence. Can anyone standing at his majestic height be deprecating to an Indian audience about development and increasing standards? As an American with a national income almost a hundred times as great, can he point to the growing emptiness of the advances made in the us? It would be mockery in an environment where the basic material needs of the vast majority are not covered. For an American ambassador extolling the Western virtues, to speak of the futility of stimulating individual needs might invite a very wrong reaction—from the point of view of an American ambassador. How can he warn against the acceptance of a goal, however distant, implying Western standards and Western inequalities when the continuation of the private enterprise system in an Indian context inevitably demands them?

When Galbraith lays down a ‘Popular Consumption Criterion’, i.e. the focusing of all economic policy on the needs of the masses, he admits the legitimacy of doubts. But he is not at liberty to discredit in detail the inner motivations of our Western economic and social system—this might produce unwelcome doubts in the minds of some Bengali student destined to permanent unemployment. It should be added, in fairness to the Americans, that Kruschev seems to have largely accepted American consumption standards as his ultimate goal. The emergence of a saner solution, more akin to Harold Wilson’s philosophy, ensuring a balance between social and private needs, between income and leisure, is unlikely to emerge unless a Labour victory in Britain ends our present feeble decay and propensity to imitate American subtopia in a minor key.

The negativist method of discussing the causes of poverty in isolation and trying to solve the problem of its causes by elimination has become very fashionable in America of late. It is an inevitable consequence of the passion for ‘rigorous’ model-building based on ceteris paribus and the variation principle, though, in my opinion, both are illegitimate in the context of large philosophical questions such as are involved in the growth and decay of empires. Yet even Professor Galbraith takes a hand at this when discussing the causes of poverty. One by one the responsibilities for poverty of the social framework, of the lack of natural resources, of motivations and government policies, of ignorance and incompetence, are dismissed and, of course, sometimes by reductio ad absurdum rather than by a detailed analysis.footnote²

The conclusion that one must be eclectic, that the case of each country ought to be treated separately, and above all that a measure of social justice is indispensable for social progress—to all these wise words one would obviously want to assent vigorously. But one would also have liked a much deeper analysis of the problem, with due emphasis, especially as far as India is concerned, on the problems of primitive agriculture and the retarding effect of technical ignorance and religious attitudes on growth. Nor does one feel reassured by Galbraith’s discussion of the relative advantages of the Marxist and Western solutions. Here again we are given a penetrating and exceptionally courageous discussion of the causes of the Marxist victory in Cuba, where ‘the concentration of wealth and land ownership (had) extended a curbing influence to economic life and to government, and where dictatorship had been endemic’. But can an affirmation of India’s commitment to the Western model be taken for granted, in view of the stagnation of the Indian economy in the last few years? The Russians attempt to export revolution not because it is cheap for them—as the Cuban case shows, it may be very expensive—but because they believe that development is otherwise impossible, on account of deep-seated sociological and economic obstacles, embodied in the national institutions of the under-developed countries.

This over-optimistic attitude is also evident in Galbraith’s discussion of the success of Indian planning, contrasted with the difficulties of planning in other countries, caused by a complete lack of administrators and technicians. What is interesting, however, is that the revolutionary countries have, for good or ill, developed new elites which, by the standards of their severest critics, have proven their mettle. If they have not been too successful in agriculture, that is no mystery. In the 19th century it took America 80 years of concentrated educational effort to get the agricultural revolution going, and this revolution is only now penetrating France, not to mention Germany. The Russian ill-success, as Dumont has shown, is due as much to natural poverty in agricultural resources as to any other single cause.