Last Saturday, in Cambridge, Mass. the economist John Kenneth Galbraith died at the age of 97. Sadly, his death seems to have been met with little notice.
Partly it was his age - by 97 obituaries have so long been on file one might forget it hasn't already been printed. The era that Galbraith towered over, of FDR, Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy, and Johnson. If you missed the obituary in the Times you'd have hardly seen a ripple from his passing. But there ought to have been. Though it would exasperate him to hear it, Galbraith's observations about human nature far outweigh in value the economics he practiced. Mainly it is because economics as a discipline has shrunk in scope and aspiration that economists disregard Galbraith's achievements.
In many ways he is like the economist Thorstein Veblen of the generation before him - in many ways he is not. Veblen's main contribution was the notion of "conspicuous consumption" a phrase that ought to be familiar to anybody who makes money in the fashion business. Galbraith's great observation, in criticizing those in his own field, political, and business leaders was his notion of the "conventional wisdom." More than anything else this idea explains without apologizing the actions that have lead to so many problems, whether economic, as in stock-market crashes or savings and loan failures, or political and diplomatic, as in the missteps and miscalcuations and misunderstandings that lead to pointless wars being started and being continued long after their error has been made manifest.
"Coventional wisdom" no longer needs quotation marks, the phrase long having been accepted as a common English phrase since its appearence in Galbraith's
The Affluent Society (1958). The idea is simple -- that people are married to their notions; we do and must continue to believe in what we believed to begin with, even if it does not bear up to reality. The conventional wisdom is held by convention, strengthened by group dynamics and entrenched by the structural nature of common endeavor, whether in academia, politics, or business. A huge part of our success at Hayden-Harnett has been to ignore the conventional wisdom: that a small designer needs to join a showroom to succeed, that bags need to be expensive to be beautiful, that consumption has to be conspicuous, that the customer prefers form over function-- well here at Hayden-Harnett we salute the true iconoclasts - not the glamorous pairing of the rich and famous on the Sundance channel; but you and us. RIP John Kenneth Galbraith, and thanks.
Labels: fashion, obituary