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Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
comes from a book review of Richard Parker’s biography of John Kenneth Galbraith.
LBJ threw away one of his drafts for a speech with the remark: ‘Did y’ever think, Ken, that making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg? It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else’
Read Skidelsky’s entire piece, which also appears in the latest Journal of Economic Literature.
READER COMMENTS
guggis
Apr 20 2006 at 10:15am
BWAAAAAAAAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAH, that is soo true.
dearieme
Apr 20 2006 at 11:01am
“his assistant Nicky Kaldor that ‘Allied bombing..by destroying civilian enterprises, released labour for the [German] war effort’”: I’d always taken that argument at face value, but now that I know that Kaldor and Galbraith were its proponents, ah hae ma doots, as Galbraith might not have said.
Charles Cox
Apr 20 2006 at 12:34pm
It’s a darned shame economics has had such a uniformly drab image in the hearts and minds of so many.
What’s the deal? Type M versus Type C? No bad guy/good guy in economics = snoozefest?
liberty
Apr 20 2006 at 1:23pm
>It’s a darned shame economics has had such a uniformly drab image in the hearts and minds of so many.
I am convinced that its just a matter of a good writer with a very sensible approach writing a book that combines *actual* economics (not political jibberish) with common sense and readability bringing another economic renaissance; Milton Freedman, Reagan and the libertarians brought one, but another is needed to help it last through this period with the current distracted public.
john pertz
Apr 20 2006 at 10:50pm
Ive often wondered if Marxism’s only function as an economic ideology is to try and inject politics into a science which is largely a political. If you are a political person then classical and even neo-classical economic theory is a huge road block. If the arguments contained within those doctrines is true then politics is ultimately useless as an ideology of progression. Therefore Marxist arguments that economic teaching is a way to enforce the dominant ideology is largely unsurprising.
Lisa
Apr 22 2006 at 11:21am
I hear from the older generation that this kind of crassness was quite typical of LBJ. Apparently, he liked to make people follow him into the bathroom and keep them talking to him while he did number 2. He’d say something like “keep talking, I’m just going to take a dump here in the stall”.
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