Prof. Galbraith

As I told last time, we decided to end these programmes by having a dozen or so world leaders spend a whole weekend discussing the problems we had raised. Our thought was to invite people who had themselves shouldered great responsibility, mostly in politics, and who could talk about it. They came to our farm in Southern Vermont, a farm where nothing grows but trees, and where we've gone for our summers for thirty years. It is deep in the hills, not only secluded but very hard to find. This by the way is the day for others to talk. I'm going to be silent, maybe unnaturally so.

Mrs. Galbraith

See how small the windows are. There even are a few original glass panes, I think. It's about 200 years old.

Prof. Galbraith

My wife, Catherine - Kitty, tells two early arrivals about the old house. Ralf Dahrendorf, former Commissioner responsible for research, science and education of the EEC and now Head of the London School of Economics, Hans Selye, Canadian scientist. Most of the others

Prof. Galbraith eventually round the house, the County Sheriff helped. Former British Prime Minister, Edward Heath - I first met him years ago when he was lecturing at Harvard.

(GENERAL CHAT)

Prof. Galbraith Welcome.
Mr. Heath Thank you very much.
Prof. Galbraith You slept well?
Mr. Heath Very, very well.
Prof. Galbraith Are you subject to jet lag?
Mr. Heath Not all that much because I try to arrange it sensibly, coming across, and I get some sleep coming over. I don't drink a lot of alcohol and eat very little, and I find it's much easier to adjust.

Prof. Galbraith I do all those things and I still can't adjust.

Prof. Galbraith Shirley Williams, British Cabinet Minister, Shirley Williams was a guest staying at the house. The next car brought a guest we very much needed for the discussion - Gyorgy Arbatov, also a friend. He is a member of the Soviet parliament, member of the Soviet Academy and a senior adviser to Mr. Brezhnev on American affairs.

Prof. Galbraith
A very great personal friend,
Kukrit Pramoj - a journalist and
very recently Prime Minister of
Thailand.

The historian, Arthur Schlesinger -
a fellow veteran of the Kennedy
administration, and his wife,
Alexandra Schlesinger.

Prof. Schlesinger Are we the last?

Prof. Galbraith No. The Winships have yet to come.

Prof. Schlesinger Winships. They left before we did.
Better send out a search party.

Prof. Galbraith Very often people get lost and never
arrive.

Mrs. Schlesinger They left about the same time we did.

Mrs. Graham
Maybe he was looking at a horse and
buggy on the way.

Prof. Galbraith
Tom Winship, the Editor of the
"Boston Globe". He lives in Vermont
and naturally thought he could find
the way without help. He did turn
up eventually.

Mr. Winship Are you just over for the weekend?

Prof. Dahrendorf
No, I was over for a Foundation
meeting. I'm a Trustee of the
Foundation. It's been quiet for
the last two years. I don't know
what it's going to be like next year.

Prof. Galbraith
Conversation began informally in two groups. Other guests joined whom we'll meet later. The cameras moved from one group to the other and, as often in discussion, you will hear first not a connected inter-change but a series of points, statements of faith.
Ralf Dahrendorf begins.

Prof. Dahrendorf
I would assume that economic performance and individual income in Britain will continue to be significantly lower than economic performance and individual income in Germany, and I would assume that there are a few intermediate stages - perhaps one or two countries will move from one level to the other - but there are going to be different levels. And I believe, I really believe, that these different levels are bearable if there are compensating social factors. And I would almost assume - it sounds a terrible thing to say for a German who lives in Britain - that the British version of somewhat lower economic performance and individual income but higher social equilibrium as you call it may well be preferable.

Mrs. Williams

What Ted was saying and what Jack
was saying, and I think what we are
looking at, really, in the Western
world, is the gradual constraining
and finally narrowing down of
competition to the point where we
can't talk any more about living with
competitive markets because we
haven't got them. And that leads me
to the next point I want to make,
which is if the instruments that
determine competition don't operate
any more because of the power of
companies and the power, in some
respects, of trade unions so that
you're looking at a different
structure of society than we used to
have, then I want to make the point,
what does this do also to the
structure of democracy, because I
think it probably does something
very profound to it. Anyway, I think
we're seeing something which lies
beyond what even Karl Marx could
have seen because he wrote a long
time ago and he showed great
perception, but that what's emerging
is the role of government, the role
of the public sector, is now so
substantial, especially in countries
like France, Italy, United Kingdom

and so forth, that what we're not looking at any longer is the classical capitalist economy. We're looking at what people sometimes call mixed economy, and I think the mixed economy will throw up something ... 

Dr. Arbatov We call it state monopoly capitalism.

Mrs. Williams No, you don't because it wouldn't be right. You're quite wrong about that because it doesn't involve state monopolies in a lot of cases.

Dr. Arbatov We don't consider our society as having achieved the ideal state of affairs. We call it the transitional period to communism. There will be a lot of changes, but the changes will go in different directions, I'm afraid, in your countries and in ours.

Mr. Heath If you spoke to millions of Russians, I believe that given the chance they would say, we'd far rather have consumer goods and try and reach the stage which American capitalism has reached rather than go on putting more and more of our resources into military power, which is what is happening at the moment in the Soviet Union.

Dr. Arbatov

I would say that if you have a
Soviet citizen, what he would prefer
more, he would first mention not to
have war, which is very understandable
for a country which has lost
twenty million people. And they
would say even, we are ready not to
have so many consumer goods but
please have peace.

Mr. Jones

I think we've reached a position
where we've got to revalue the
situation say as between the
college professor and the long
shoreman or the miner, partly
because there's a hell of a lot of
compensation built into the
professional job, with respect to
the Professor. He does have
security, he does have better
pension opportunities, better
holidays and so on. And we've
got to allow the working man -
the manual worker - to catch up
with a lot of these security
elements.

Dr. Arbatov

You know, it's very pleasing for
a Marxist heart to listen to
different sort of representatives
of capitalist society out
discussing their problems which
actually we have mainly solved.

Dr. Arbatov

I think unemployment and inflation and for my colleagues it would be a new demonstration of the eternal truths found in Marx about this major contradiction between socialization of production and private ownership.

Mr. Jones

It's my view that half the problem in Northern Ireland is the lack of jobs. It's the difference over work that creates the tension.

Forty thousand jobs into Northern Ireland could probably bring peace tomorrow, because when young people are without a job they begin to talk and take an interest in anything, and if there's some apparently great dedicated cause, they will take part in that even if it means throwing bombs, and that is the awful tragedy of an area like Northern Ireland that this has developed mainly because of lack of job opportunity. So don't let's run away from that responsibility.

Dr. Selye

I don't know that it's more harmful or distressful to be afraid of pollution or of atomic war or of the crash of the stock exchange than it is to be afraid of being eaten up by a bear.

comparisons between the implications
of the two types of threat, I
think it's anybody's guess. It's
my personal guess, but this I have
no proof for except an empirical
one - it seems to me that that's
how everything has always worked -
man has an innate tendency to go
up to the maximum of his stress
tolerance. Like a racehorse likes
to run, and it likes to run as
fast as it can, and it will meet
the stresses and strains of
whatever is the stress and strain
in its particular situation.

Prof. Schlesinger I agree with Dahrendorf. I think that what industrial society has done has been to undermine the traditional and spontaneous natural organic forms of cohesion. And as these have been undermined, nothing has arisen to take its place. Therefore you get these tribalistic or quasi-religious movements like fascism and communism which produce an artificial cohesion through main force.

Prof. Dahrendorf

I really feel that we must have
reached the end of the period in
which industrial development and
everything that goes with it is sort
of a purpose in itself, and it seems
to me that all the developed
societies will only survive if they
recognise that there's more to life
than industrial growth, the growth
of cities, the development of cities,
the creation of more of the same
thing. And it is indeed my view
that many countries - incidentally
so-called capitalists, as well as
so-called socialists, and indeed
the so-called socialists more
than the capitalists - have made
the same mistake, and that is the
mistake to believe that the world
of work and the world of living
around work is one which is bound
to be messy and unpleasant, and in
many ways inhuman. And in many
ways, we've made the mistake of
believing that all we have to do is
get out of it, that the great thing
to achieve is for the working man
to have more spare time, and the
great thing to achieve is for the
city dweller to go out to the
country and have a chance to go out

actually necessary to save and to
have this pattern of deferring
gratification - of saving today
in order to have greater
possibilities tomorrow for the
individual, and of amassing capital,
investing it, having growth and so
on and so forth. And you could
argue, you know, that a developed
capitalist society can survive
only if it abandons Calvinism
and adopts hedonism. In other
words, in order to solve the same
problem of keeping industry going,
of keeping industrial production
going, you need a different
approach, you need a different set
of values.

Prof. Galbraith

I have a deep personal conviction on this. I was born and brought up on a Canadian farm, and I have regarded my whole life as being an escape from manual labour. So I would hate to think that I had at any juncture been under some obligation to return to the farm that I have admittedly and bare-facedly tried to escape from.

Dr. Arbatov

That's a bit different, Professor.
If you want to go to university,
you haven't passed the exams.
Then you go to work but you have
this hope. You work for two or
three years, then you have one
year's preparatory courses, and
then you can go.

Mr. Heath

What Kenneth is saying is that
from his point of view at any rate,
if you're working on a shop floor
on a production line it's a very
dull, boring business, and it's
get no ennobling effect. Surely
this goes to the root of our
industrial society today. If it is
a dull, boring business, and I
don't think it requires very much
imagination from the outside to
see that that is so, then what in
fact do you do about it. Because
to be doing that eight hours a day,
five days a week, year after year,
and know it's going on for the
rest of your life, and that in all
probability you'll have reached
the top of the acknowledged wage
scale probably by the time you're,
what, 25, 28 - something like that?

Mr. Jones

Earlier.

Mr. Heath

Earlier. And therefore for the
rest of your life, you're on
that spot, in that groove.
That really is the cause of the
frustration, surely, in modern
industrial society. And what
do you do about it and how do you
tackle it. I think all too
little has been done on this
aspect of it.

Prof. Dahrendorf

Well, I'm sure work is not boring
for 99% of the people. It may be
boring for something like 30 or
35% of people - that's the order
of magnitude I would think of.
And there I believe one can do a
lot to make it less boring.

Mr. Jones

I think that's right. It doesn't
follow that working even a
repetitious job is boring if
you're able to converse with your
neighbour, if there's a degree of
conversation and chatting and
joking with each other. But, you
see, the more you modernise
methods of production, the more you
try to eliminate the labour element,
often the more isolated the job
becomes. So that, for example, in
a modern petrol chemical plant

Dr. Selye

you will get one or two people
watching an instrument panel in
the control room, and that can be
highly boring. They're required
to be alert all the time but
they lack the friendship and
conversation that, in another
type of job, might be available.
So you can enjoy work in many
cases. The real problem often is
getting work, getting enough work.
Shorter work hours and early
retirement may be very, very
deserved and should be permitted
for some who want it. But on the
other hand, those who don't want
it, why not let them do what they
want. I think that we have to
take into account the biological
fact that you need the feeling of
having an outlet for your energy,
of having some satisfactory
recognition for your work, and
that is a very major point in
motivation.

Mr. Jones

There's a lot of things that can
be done, and a lot of enjoyment of
life, I believe, could be secured
if we can improve the basic
training skills of young people.

and irresponsibility of youth
arises because they've really
lost an interest or haven't
developed an interest in wider
living.

Prof. Dahrenderf
The boredom of leisure can be
greater than the boredom of
work.

Prof. Galbraith
I still disagree. I think that the
enjoying effect of tedious manual
toy is greatly exaggerated,
and I am prepared, both for myself
and my children, to avoid that
enjoyment.

Mrs. Williams
No, I'm going to jump up and down.
I don't think it's enjoying.
I think that not having ever
experienced it means that you don't
understand the problems of a very
large part of society. The reason
why I think it's important to link
the grant to it - I wouldn't stop
people paying their own way -
but if you're going to give a
grant to people to go to university,
I think it's a perfectly fair
condition to say that they ought
to have spent some time in the
world outside the straight
academic world, because the

sequence of school, teacher
training college, school is very
common in all our countries. I
think it's a wholly bad sequence.
I don't think people know what
they're teaching.

Prof. Schlesinger I think that the role of formal
education in shaping people in
society has been much exaggerated.
I think altogether too much has
been centred on the schools, and
the schools have become the great
alibi for the breakdown of the
other institutions of society.
The family is no longer performing
what its function had been at one
point. The Church is no longer
doing it. The end of the
apprenticeship system and things
like that have meant that the
problem of entry into the economic
world is a much more impersonal
thing. And as these other
institutions have broken down, the
other - I hate the terminology -
what the sociologists call the
agencies of socialisation, it's all
been dumped off on the schools,
and the school has become the great
alibi for everyone else, everyone
outside the schools.

on the one side unduly academic
people who are prepared to tell
people like me what we should do
without perhaps a knowledge of
what it means in terms of
practical workout.

Mrs. Williams

I've thought for a long time that
one of the things we ought to do
is to have a requirement that
anybody who takes a university
grant must have worked in a proved
form of employment for at least
a year. In other words, what I
think we're doing is taking far
too many kids straight from school
into university without any wider
experience of life at all, and
very often as a result dropping
out after the first year because
they're fed up with what they
are doing.

Prof. Schlesinger

That's why I feel that the whole
problem of education has to be
recast. I think we are still
trapped by the conventional
categories of childhood,
adolescence and so on. We suppose
education is something that is
completed at 22, and higher
education fits into the 18 to 22-
year-old box. Ridiculous.

Prof. Dahrenderf

aren't ready for higher education
at that stage. They feel it
themselves. That's why there's
been so much tendency in the
colleges for people who could, in
another time, would have borne
the intellectual but who feel in
one way or another, this isn't the
time for them to do this. They
go off, they travel, they take a
job. I think far from this being
regarded as an aberration or
failure, it seems to me it's taking
place on such a large scale that
it's a perfectly natural response.

Thinking of education and work
and leisure and old age and
retirement as if they were
mechanical boxes, and if somehow
these boxes don't fit at one point,
as they don't seem to between
education and jobs at the moment,
then we have a gap and we don't
quite know what to do about it.
Now my view is, to take this
particular problem, that one of the
answers is to reconstruct the
boxes as it were, or perhaps
forget about the boxes and think
about human life in a different way.

Mr. Jones

Think of it in one context.
Think of it as one continuing
process, and the answer to that to
be more specific is that, in my
view, there should be a much closer
integration of education and work.
That is, when one talks about
a reduction of the working day,
one must have something in mind
for what people are doing..
Well, of course you've got to
extend leisure opportunities.
But those leisure opportunities
of course can be active, and they
can include some do-it-yourself.
I mean, no-one's going to stop
that process. Indeed it would be
a very good thing if more and more
ordinary folk could do essential
repairs around a motor-car, for
example, and understand what's
wrong. These are things that
should be encouraged. This is part
of the way of life. I don't
exclude either the great opportunities
for art that exist for working
people. After all, a lot of things
which professional groupings and
highly educated people appreciate
as normal, the appreciation of

plays, of music, of painting and
so on, it passes over the head
of millions of ordinary people,
of working people. Frankly I
know little about art. I've
hardly ever seen a play and so on.
And I am typical in that sense
of lots of working men and women,
so that we've got to encourage
at the educational stage this
appreciation, which would make
life much more worthwhile.

Prof. Dahrendorf

I suspect the cost of change is
greater than the ultimate cost of
a new arrangement. It is the
change-over which is generally
costly. I mean that is one of the
great experiences certainly of my
life, that even reforms which are
designed ultimately to get more
out of every pound or every dollar
are expensive in the first place.
When you do it, when you change
educational institutions, when you
make different arrangements on
jobs, when you change the system
of pensions, that is actually
costly and requires a relatively
favourable period of economic
development.

Mr. Heath
It's quite incredible. They want to take good and bad alike. They don't discriminate in the least.

Prof. Galbraith
As always, the discussion ends with economics or at any rate with money, and in the case of Edward Heath with nationalized industry.

Prof. Galbraith
Why don't you follow our policy of doing in secret. We've just nationalized all the Eastern railroads in secret.

Mrs. Williams
I know you have. That makes your point, doesn't it.

Mr. Heath
They are driven to resort to septuagenarians to try and run these things, retired professors and that sort of thing.

Mrs. Williams
But they are bailing their capitalists out. You have to bail capitalists out. They can't bail themselves out.

Prof. Galbraith
But by doing it in secret, we avoid all this terrible...

Prof. Galbraith
Now it's lunchtime.

(GENERAL CHAT)

Prof. Galbraith

There's a nice calculation here.

Enough food to stop hunger but
not so much as to send everyone
off to sleep.

(GENERAL CHAT)

Prof. Galbraith

Over lunch, Ted Heath takes time
out to become eloquent on the
British income tax.

Mr. Heath

I've got these years to do before
I retire and that's that, and you
take a perk of some kind or other.
But when you're the lower
management and you're looking to
the future, you say all right,
I've done all my training, I've
now done my hard work and here I
am at 25 and what's the future?
And the future is that I pay
83% as a minimum of everything
I earn.

Prof. Galbraith

I'm sorry to have to correct you
on your history, Arthur, but I'm
prepared to do so. He was
selected for Vice President and
the campaign was well under way
before it was agreed that he was
constitutionally ineligible and
was dumped.

Mr. Heath

So the fellow says, why should I go on with this sort of thing. And what's more, the actual salary on which you pay 83% is roughly half of what you would get if you were in the Federal Republic or in France or these other countries.

Mr. Jones

Do you think there'll be an emergence of their National Health Service?

Prof. Galbraith

That's coming anyway and it's promised.

Prof. Galbraith

At lunch our guests decided to amalgamate the two seminars, have general conversation. One talks less but misses less.

(GENERAL CHAT)

Prof. Galbraith

The first topic was the developing countries, the Third World. I had asked Gyorgy Arbatov of Russia to start this discussion.

there, and the problem has to be
solved in the coming decade at
least otherwise it will become a
very acute and very serious
problem. I think how the so-
called rich countries, advanced
countries, can help - I have told
about it. The first service would
be to end the Cold War and attempt
to use these countries for Cold War
purposes. Then not to involve them
in arms race, in the conflicts
which we have in different parts
of the world. And I think also the
solution of some problems - we
haven't solved problems which are
very dangerous - South Africa,
some other places. I think that
it was not yet really worked out
by economists, by scholars and by
governments. The whole big
subject of the most effective way
of assistance. There are different
opinions, but of course education
especially. But all of it must
coincide with internal changes
in former colonial countries,
with creation of such economic
climate and social climate which

Mr. Heath

will be really favourable to rapid
economic development.

I think the whole of this
discussion so far has been out of
date and completely unrealistic.
It bears no relationship to the
modern world at all. The plain
fact is that the Soviet Union has
done almost nothing to help any
developing country in the past two
decades unless it was putting in
force. Its contribution towards
the Third World has been minimum,
unless it was putting in force
which it thought would change the
regime to its own purposes.

Mr. Heath

When you come to look at the
question of the Third World, and
you talk about the rich world,
which is the rich world today?
The rich world today is the oil-
producing countries. That's the
rich world. Not Britain. Not the
rest of Western Europe, which has
got large trade deficits. The rich
world is the oil-producing world
which has got enormous surpluses,
and which first of all doesn't
know what to do with its surpluses
and secondly is very unwilling to
use them to any constructive
purpose with the rest of its
Third World brethren. Then you
come to this very, in a way much
more controversial, political
question about the help which you
give to individual countries.
I think it goes beyond ordinary
human forebearance to say, all
right we'll help such and such a
country. And when they appear at
a United Nations discussion they
kick us in the teeth. The
ordinary British voter says to
himself, why am I contributing

Dr. Arbatov

out of tax to help another
country, and then at the U.N.
they just kick us in the teeth and
say, your absolute hell, you're
an imperialist power, we disagree
with everything you do and so on.
These are really very basic human
considerations.

Many of these countries were your
for mer colonies, and they in one
way or another helped very much to
prepperity of Great Britain, and
made it what it has become. In
19th Century and beginning, maybe,
of the 20th Century. I think
that you cannot say that it is not
your moral duty now because you
are poor. This is also very
relative. If the Americans,
comprising 6% of the world
population, consume 40% of world
resources and feel themselves poor,
it's another kind of being poor
than these other countries.

I think it has to be regarded as a
special duty, assistance to the
countries - the fermal colonial
countries.

Kukrit Pramej

You mentioned that your help to
China was a disappointment. What
was the disappointment? Why
were you so disappointed about
China? What did China do?
I am asking this in case in the
future I became something important
again, if I were to solicit
help from the great Soviet Union
I might not be a disappointment to
you.

Dr. Arbatov

Well, you know, it's really a bit
unfair to discuss this problem in
the absence of Chinese. Every
fourth of us had to be a Chinese
according to statistics.

Prof. Dahrendorf

I had Chinese ancestors.

Dr. Arbatov

After the Chinese Revolution, it
was very emotional and sentimental
in our country, and we were very
poor and in a very bad state.
It lasted for may be one decade or
more, their opposition towards
first moves, towards detente in our
foreign policy, when they
criticised us for being not truly
Marxist, that Marxist view would be
only revolutionary wars etc. etc.

Then it became more and more
 distracted from any ideological
 schisms, and simply was territorial
 claims, was other things. I
 wouldn't say that many people in
 our country can understand it any
 other way than they need because of
 their internal difficulties to
 have external enemies surrounding
 which will help to bring all if it
together.

Kukrit Pramej

That seems to prove my point at
the beginning. There's a great
deal of ideological basis in these
helps, and if you receive the help
and you deviate from the ideology
of your helper, you'll become a
disappointment.

Mr. Jones

Surely the job of politicians
throughout the world, whether it's
the left or the right, should be
concerned with helping countries
like yours so that you can preserve
neutrality but develop trade and
develop industry. I'm trying to
support you on this. I'm supporting
the voice of Thailand for neutrality.
We in Britain are not quite so
altruistic as Ted Heath has been
suggesting. We do give a lot of

I know it and I know he is.

But a lot of our overseas aid is
related to British goods going
to the undeveloped countries.
British goods, American goods
Russian goods and so on - there(s
a lot to be said for that if it's
to raise the standard of people,
if it's to bring them more into
line in terms of standard of living
with the more developed countries
of the world. But it's how you
do it without pressures, without
undue influence, not only of a
political nature but of an
industrial nature. We in the trade
union movement are very concerned
about the attitude, for example, of
multinational companies that are
prepared to exploit the Third World,
and when we try to assist our
brothers and sisters in the Third
World, our brothers and sisters say
are you doing us damage by trying
to raise our standard of living,
you are denying us employment
because the multinational companies
then withdraw and move to another
undeveloped country.