The BBC's Today Programme yesterday had a segment on John Kenneth Galbraith, the intellectual who died at the weekend. Galbraith famously argued in the mid-80s that the Soviet system was better than the capitalist system because “in contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower”. Well, the Soviets did have the Gulag. As Don Luskin puts it, “If he'd had has his way and more than he did, the US would have succeeded like Russia did.” His support for socialism, along with other Western intellectuals, led Prof. Kenneth Minogue (shortly after the collapse of the Berlin Wall) to write a paper called Does socialism mean never having to say you're sorry?

And in a review of one of Galbraith's books in 1999, Reason magazine writes: “There is a quaint frozen-in-time quality to Galbraith's thought - sort of Austin Powers without the bad teeth and mojo. Looking at Great Society welfare programs, he maintains that the solution to poverty is simply to give money to poor people, without necessarily expecting them to do work. In the decades since LBJ's War on Poverty, all but the staunchest statists have surrendered to reality and abandoned such notions. Oddly, Galbraith vents inordinate anger about America's effort to defeat Soviet communism in the Cold War. Austin - I mean, Mr. Galbraith...we won.”

The radio segment features an interview with Labour peer Lord Desai, who gives his views on the man. It is, I think, a fair assessment of the man's influence. Listen to it online (it's 3m43s long).

Hat tip: Samizdata.net