Galbraith versus Friedman: the great debate is not over yet

I would love to have been a fly on the wall — or a butler — at the US embassy

I would love to have been a fly on the wall — or a butler — at the US embassy in New Delhi in March 1963 when Milton Friedman, champion of laissez-faire, came to lunch with J.K. Galbraith, high priest of higher welfare spending and at that time President Kennedy’s ambassador to India. Not only were the two economists lifelong intellectual opponents who found each other’s core beliefs morally reprehensible, but the magisterial Galbraith stood some 20 inches taller than the bantam-cock Friedman.

Despite their differences they had in fact been on friendly terms since both worked in Washington during the second world war — and Friedman claimed credit for the origin of Galbraith’s connection with India. Some years earlier Galbraith had encountered an Indian government official who told him that Friedman — then one of a tiny, Chicago-based academic minority who dared to challenge the Keynesian orthodoxies embraced by Galbraith — had been proposed by the Eisenhower administration as an adviser on India’s economic planning. Galbraith responded that such an appointment would be ‘like asking the Holy Father to advise on the operations of a birth control clinic’, and found himself invited in Friedman’s place. When Friedman and his wife Rose visited India in 1963, their invitation to lunch came with a gracious note from the ambassador: ‘As you know, I do not agree with your ideas, but they will do less harm in India than anywhere else I can think of.’ But Rose recorded that lunch was ‘delightful’, and Milton sought cheerful revenge in due course by opposing Galbraith’s candidacy for president of the American Economic Association.