Amen!

And yet - if the simplistic explanation for phenomena is simplistic, and the world is really just a lot more complicated than that, with many factors overlapping, the young may not be wrong, but the failure is still lamentable.

I agree with aphrael. My own feeling is that a correct response to every question in any field is "it's more complicated than that". That's not likely to move youth (it wouldn't have moved me, fifteen years ago) but I think that the young person who gets it will be better off than the young person who doesn't.
My reading of Galbraith, which is very shallow and began in my thirties anyway, leads me to think that a better short summary would be something like "the real world is not only more complicated than a model of it, it is more important than the model." All of his most persuasive points were from finding where the easily summarized theories simply failed to describe reality, and stating that these were flaws in the theories, not flaws in reality. It's true that stylistically he assumed that the reader knew a lot more than I did, and thought about, rather than rejected, a variety of models, but that's a matter of style, not doctrine.
I suppose I'm curious to know whether you think that it's not wrong for the young to fail to be moved by thinkers whose doctrines cannot be easily summarized, but that the no-longer-young should be able to examine those doctrines in a more leisurely fashion, and be moved by them (in that slow-moving way of the middle-aged). That is, is it something about youth that makes your comment true, or something about the doctrines? Or both?
Thanks,
-V.

Interesting. One of the things that's becoming clear as I read the book in question is that Galbraith, pretty much alone of the prominent post-war economists, disdained the newfound reliance on mathematical rigor. In his view, rigorous mathematical analysis led economists down a false path: when the formula predicted one thing and actual data demonstrated something else, they would reject the data in favor of the results predicted by formulaic formalism.

That's part of the reason there is no galbraithian school: he worked on instinct and on political analysis as much, if not more, than he did on mathematical analysis and econometrics ... and modern economics is dominated by the analytical- and econometric crowd.

So of course his ideas get short shrift.

I dunno, I think I'm with de Long and Galbraith on this one, Mr. Moles. Are "the young" looking for truth, or just their marching orders? Truth is messy.

Life may be too short to read the complete works of everybody; that is, however, not a free pass to claim that you know what you're talking about.

Ben, when did I say I knew what I was talking about? (And if I did, I’d hope to have a better excuse than that.)

I don’t know about the young, but what I’m looking for in a theory is useful tools that advance my understanding. I can enjoy a gestalt look at the universe, but only as poetry. (I’m not discounting the value of poetry, but neither do I think that the value of an argument is necessarily related to how prettily it’s phrased.)

What I’d like is for someone to, as deLong puts it, “math up” Galbraith. And Marx. (And maybe even Derrida.) I’ve certainly run into the sort of people — and the sort of economists — you’re describing, Rob (see the economist joke a few threads back). But I think not having the math wouldn’t have saved them from being wrong; it just would have required them to be wrong at greater length and in a less disprovable way.

Ah, but the way to defeat idiots who claim that theory is more useful than observation is not to write up your observational results in theoretically rigorous form. That just concedes the point.

I suppose then the question is whether it really is an economics problem, after all... The sad part is that deciding whether Galbraith is correct or not (in any of his arguments) is not a matter of trying to poke logical holes in his arguments but of whether or not you recognize the world he describes. I did, mostly, but then as a baseball fan I'm aware that the world I recognize isn't (in large measure) the world that statistics describe. In baseball, I think that the stats on the whole are more accurate than my eyeballs. In economics, I think the stats are for crap, and not trusting my eyeballs leaves me with nuthin'. I'm trying to apply that to other fields, but it isn't working...
Thanks,
-V.