Reconstruction and rehabilitation have become new buzzwords, even though disarming militants and demilitarising society is a much more urgent concern. Peace has begun to be coupled with development rather than democracy. Economist Ram Sharan Mahat is back at Bagh Darbar and is reportedly busy urging donors and diplomats to help him with budgetary support.
Speaking of economists, last week marked the passing away of John Kennth Galbraith, probably he last of the true Keynesians at age 97. Galbraith turned Keynes into a seer of our times with irreverence, wit, courage, compassion and turns of phrases that would have made his master proud. The economist who coined such evocative phrases as 'the affluent societ&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#'&#̵'216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;216;', 'conventional wisdom' and 'countervailing power' is no more.
John Maynard Keynes' prescription that the government must tax the rich and spend the proceeds on creating jobs-paying them for digging and filling holes if necessary-arose from his realisation that unemployment was the main predicament of the poor and it should be the chief concern of all economists. Growth will then take care of itself. Appropriately enough, the passing away of one of the pillars of a planned economy was hardly noticed in a kingdom beholden to the prescriptions of Bretten Woods Sisters.
Galbraith was better known in South Asia as the US ambassador to New Delhi during Indo-China war. Very few remember that Galbraith was one of the pioneers of need-based economic planning propagated by Prof P C Mahalanobis of Indian Statistical Institute in 1950s where he worked as an Adviser to the Indian Planning Commission.
In the rarefied stratosphere of professional economists, critics hold that Galbraith's works lack mathematical rigour. But the old horse never let his critics come between his words and their devotees. Amartya Sen has compared The Affluent Society to Shakespeare's Hamlet for its force. 'It's full of quotations,' said Sen. He wrote as if there was no tomorrow for over half-a-century and has left a legacy almost impossible to equal, let alone surpass, in the age of the ether.
Art Buchwald once introduced Galbraith with: "Since 1959 alone, he has written 12 books, 135 articles, 61 book reviews, 16 book introductions, 312 book blurbs and 105,876 letters to The New York Times, of which all but 3 have been printed."
Galbraith's rejection of trickle-down economics remains unparalleled: 'If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows.' He was even more strident in his criticism of free-market fundamentalism. Citing fellow-economist William K Black's provocative book The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One, he prophesied that predatory entrepreneurs will rob whatever they can if not held in check by stringent regulatory mechanism. In Nepal, robbing banks, airlines, spinning mills, luxury hotels has been honed into a fine art.
Utopians aren't going to like it, but Galbraith believed that it was impossible to completely eradicate inequalities from society. He recommended a constant search for balance through politics instead. His last major work is a compact treatise on The Economics of Innocent Fraud, said to be capable of doing for liberals what the Manifesto did to the communists. In an open affront to extremists of the left and the right alike, he calls for a coalition of the concerned rather than that of the willing and urges negotiations between unequal economic beings in the egalitarian arena of politics.
'The affluent will still be affluent, the comfortable still comfortable, but the poor would be part of the political system,' he wrote. This is a far cry from his earlier stand that it was impossible to comfort the afflicted without afflicting the comfortable. But perhaps the wise old man realised in the end that there was no getting away from suffering in this world.
On Buddha's birthday we could remind ourselves that coping even while constantly engaged in lessening the affliction of fellow human beings is the best even an economist can aspire for.
