The Age of Uncertainty

In one way, this hook represents John Kenneth Galbraith’s finest hour. The economist has long been an entertainer manque. Here his talent for show business is at last allowed to bloom. The Age of Uncertainty is the “book version” of the scripts for Galbraith’s recently completed television series for the BBC, on economic history from Adam Smith to the present moment. Galbraith writes sparely—television has disciplined him—and leavens his text with his familiar, fond world-weariness. And he writes instructively, though his lessons are mostly those one should have learned in Economics 201: these pages are perfectly unencumbered by original thought.

For reasons that have little to do with its value as a text, this is a fascinating book, an inadvertent case study of the intellectual as celebrity. What happens to a man when you fly him from London to California so that he might stand before the cameras in Death Valley intoning about “nuclear holocaust”? Galbraith demonstrates the plight of the man of thought who has all he could wish for in the way of an audience and suddenly has less to say than ever; who realizes that his conviction and insight must be reduced to charm and banality. It is an instance of the private mind becoming, as they say in television, a “talking head.”