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?