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8ЭКОНОМИКА ПРЕДПРИНИМАТЕЛЬСТВА И ИННОВАЦИИ
J. K. Galbraith1 OLD AND NEW PRAGMATISM 2
Drawing on a few personal examples, this short essay calls for approaching the problems of our time, especially climate change, from a practical perspective, in the spirit of the philosophical approach known as "pragmatism."
Keywords: pragmatism, philosophy, economic policy, climate change, green new deal. UDK 330.352
What approach to economic policy is most suitable for Russia - and other countries -today? The ideological models of state socialism and "free-market" capitalism were polar opposites developed for political reasons during the Cold War. They did not work out very well, neither one nor the other. "Pure" capitalism collapsed in the advanced countries of the West in 1930, and was never restored despite many devoted followers and acolytes. What happened to state socialism is well-known.
The alternative to ideological models is pragmatism. It is a word that is very commonly misunderstood. Pragmatism is often confused with political opportunism or with centrism -the desire to be in the middle and to hold power without regard to principles. But pragmatism is something else. It is flexible, open-minded, technical and scientific. It is an approach which aims to identify actual problems and to develop ways to resolve them.
Pragmatism is a philosophical term which originated in the United States in the 1870s. It grew from two important roots. One was the scientific materialism that emerged along with the work of Charles Darwin, an understanding that the natural world was the product of evolutionary process and natural selection, and not of intelligent (or unintelligent) design. The other root, perhaps more important in the American context, was the victory of industrial power and military professionalism in the American Civil War, a conflict that obliged many
1 James Kenneth Galbraith, Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Doctor of Economics.
2 Adapted from remarks at the Opening of the Academic Year, University of Gdansk. September 30, 2019.
officers in the Northern army - who were not idealists but products of the racial thinking of their time - to lead men in a cause to which they did not personally subscribe. It was an age associated intellectually with such names as Charles Saunders Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, and later in the 20th century John Dewey. It was an age that favored experiment and experience over ideology, doctrine and faith. Pragmatism was in its essence a tribute to the essential scientific sensibility and to the preeminence of practical knowledge.
The greatest of the American economists was raised in this tradition. He was a man of Norwegian extraction, Thorstein Veblen, who distinguished a fundamental social division between the ceremonial occupations - government, the priesthood, the professorate, sports and war - and the industrial or productive activity guided by engineers and conducted by men and women - and especially by women. The productive sectors were imbued, Veblen argued, with an instinct of workmanship; their engagement with technique and technologies gave them the orderly cause-and-effect mental discipline of the machine and the production line. They solved problems in ways that were guided by physical realities, and not by recourse to dogma.
Now in my profession, which is economics, and particularly in the United States, practical knowledge is not at the core of the field. Economics has become ideological. It is rife with such concepts as supply and demand, anciently rooted in the classical Chinese notion of celestial harmony, perfect competition, equilibrium and so forth. These are idealizations, abstractions. And while they pose as universal truths, they operate in service to doctrines. The general preference for markets, "free markets", and capitalism over socialism is a strong part of this doctrine - the notion that there is a self-organization to society that cannot be improved upon by conscious thought or policy. Pragmatism says instead that one should focus not on the simple world of textbooks and first principles, but on the world that actually exists.
In the American experience, the quintessential pragmatist and pragmatic era was that of Franklin Roosevelt and of the 'New Deal,' launched in 1933.
The New Deal is also the starting point of my own father's career. He was born in Canada in 1908, but his career began in Washington in 1934, as part of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, one of the first agencies created by the New Deal. Roosevelt faced an ecological catastrophe, the 'Dust Bowl.' The New Deal planted a billion trees across America to control erosion and restore the soil. The American South had been impoverished, in fact destitute, since the Civil War seven decades before. The New Deal brought electrification and industry to that region. Twenty five percent of American workers were unemployed in 1933; the New Deal brought them jobs and jobs programs. A million kilometers of roads were paved; tunnels, bridges, dams; more than a thousand airfields were built, as well as schools in every rural location in America, and court houses, and museums. Social insurance and social security were invented to protect the elderly. The bankrupt banks were closed; those that could be saved were reorganized; the depositors' deposits were insured for the first time. This new system was not capitalism, and it was not socialism. It was simply those things that seemed to work to deal with the problems the country faced at the time.
My father came to economics from a farm. He never studied higher mathematics or foreign languages, and I think his interest in the classical economists did not emerge until substantially later in his life. He wrote as a young man for a local newspaper in Canada on such topics as how to get tuberculosis out of the cows. He wrote as a graduate student on bees, honey bees, apiculture, and on budgets of county governments. And when he finally came to work for the federal government, his first assignments were on such matters as where to put the ammunition factories for the coming war.
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My father was in Washington the weekend of Pearl Harbor, by that time working for the Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply. At that moment he was the first to recognize the immediate economic consequence of the attack, which was the need to ban the sale of rubber tires in order to preserve that strategic resource, as the Empire of Japan marched towards Malaya. For a year thereafter, he had control in a supposedly capitalist economy of every price and every wage in America. This made him unpopular. I asked him where he found 17,000 people whom he hired to administer price control. He said "land grant colleges. I hired all of the economics professors." I don't believe that was strictly true, but you get the idea.
In the postwar period John Kenneth Galbraith was an essential architect of the return to self-government in Germany, and he was actually the first, maybe not most influential, but the first to see the necessity and to propose what became the Marshall Plan. His study of the effects of strategic bombing in that war led him directly decades later into the leadership of the opposition to the American war in Vietnam as an exercise in destructive futility, a matter on which he advised President Kennedy, a close friend to whom he had taught economics at Harvard in the mid-1930s. And as Kennedy's ambassador to India, he worked with the delegation to the International Control Commission to attempt to achieve a negotiated settlement and stave off the disaster that was clearly in view. He might have become ambassador to the USSR, had Kennedy survived and been re-elected in 1964; his assignment would have been to negotiate an end to the Cold War. This was a man who had practical knowledge and applied it in practical ways.
A new pragmatism has advocates among economists today. For instance, when Grze-gorz Kolodko became the Finance Minister of Poland in 1994, he took a pragmatic approach. The debt accumulated in the previous regime could not be paid. He worked out how to write it down. Where a policy known sometimes as 'shock therapy' had damaged Polish society, he acted, case by case, to repair the damage. Where institutions were needed, he worked to build them. Where enduring pillars of culture needed support, he found ways to provide it. The Polish success which has now endured for three decades as one of the remarkable stories of post socialist Europe owes a great deal to the practical and pragmatic frame of mind exhibited by the leaders of Polish society at critical junctures in this period. The contrast with those countries who, for a time in the 1990s, embarked on ideological experiments is very stark.
At the same time, I was acting as an adviser to the Government of China, another rather prominent example of the pragmatic approach to economic decision making. I consider that my role was primarily to keep them away from certain ideological figures, in which task I mostly succeeded. The Chinese did not need outside help. But I learned from them, in particular some Chinese expressions which are worth bearing in mind. They say, "Seek truth from facts," and "Cross the river by feeling for the stones." This is the expression of the creed which we can call New Pragmatism.
The tasks ahead will fall to the next generation. That generation will not find the answers in the text books. It will not find them in formulas; it will not find them in the simple-minded or the relatively simple application of mathematics and deductive reasoning from first principles - although it is the certainly the case that understanding math and statistics and evidence will help along the way. Instead, representatives of the next generation will have to look to the world around them in order to frame their best understanding of the massive problems that we face and look for the path forward that can make progress against those problems in a practical and effective way.
In particular, the next generation will face the climate crisis. My generation's unpleasant bequest to the next generation will require by far the largest coordinated effort of planning,
regulation, investment and social transformation ever attempted by human society, and it will require that it be done on the scale of the planet as whole. This is a task which cannot be entrusted to magic. It cannot be expected to be performed for us by incantations to markets or to governments for that matter. Nor to any other institutional formula beyond what the young people are capable of imagining and bringing into action.
The climate crisis will require a new pragmatism, to underpin what is sometimes called a Green New Deal, which should draw some inspiration from the comprehensive innovation and pragmatic spirit of the original New Deal. It is an approach to take up problems one at a time as they come forward and define the best way to address them in the practical spirit of Franklin Roosevelt, of my father John Kenneth Galbraith, of Grzegorz Kolodko, and of the Chinese leadership at certain times, perhaps most strongly represented by Deng Xiaoping.
In Russia, this approach is not - by any means - unknown. In fact, a pragmatic spirit has underpinned the most successful and promising moments in Russian history, from Peter and Catherine down through the New Economic Policy and the Thaw to the present day. Today in Russia, where disaffection with ideologies is well-founded, perhaps the pragmatic view will continue to gain adherents, as indeed I hope for my own country.
In conclusion, let me paraphrase in just one respect my country's greatest pragmatist, a man whose pragmatism existed before the word was actually brought in to common use.
The president of the United States during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, understood that there was only one practical way to win that war in its darkest moments in 1862. And that was to emancipate the slaves. He understood this was not something you did simply because it was the right thing to do, although it was, but because it would change the military balance and bring about victory in the war itself. The slaves, once free, would be brought in to the struggle in this way, would fight for their freedom themselves, as indeed they did.
In his message to the United States Congress at the end of 1862, Lincoln closed with the following words, "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise to the occasion. As our case is new, we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our planet." I changed just one word. Lincoln said 'country,' I say 'planet.' Because that is the task which the next generation will have to undertake.
Дж. К. Гэлбрейт. Старый и новый прагматизм. Основываясь на личном опыте, автор призывает подойти к рассмотрению современных проблем, в особенности к изменению климата, с практической точки зрения в рамках философского подхода, известного под названием «прагматизм».
Ключевые слова: прагматизм, философия, экономическая политика, изменение климата, Новый Зеленый Курс.
