The BBC has posted the archive of transcripts and talks from the Reith Lecture Series, which started in 1948 with Bertrand Russell and this year features Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi. It's a complete treasure trove and I started with John Kenneth Galbraith's 1966 lecture on The New Industrial State.

It sent me back to browsing the book and, of course, considering the parallels between then and now. The figures he gives for concentration in the US economy at the time are still staggering: at the end of 1974, the biggest 200 manufacturing firms in the US (less than a tenth of one percent of the total number) held two thirds of all assets and accounted for three fifths of all sales.  I wonder what the corresponding figures today would be – one would want to include services as well as manufacturing, but the picture would be no less concentrated, for sure.

In many ways the book of course reflects its times – the Cold War, and the corresponding emphasis on the 'military-industrial complex'. But some of its themes remain relevant, including the relationship between technology, capital requirements and economic organisational forms, and between economic power and political power. This is a lesson we have painfully re-learnt since the financial crisis, thanks in no small part to economists such as Simon Johnson.

I'm not a fan of J.K.Galbraith's work. I've always found the rhetoric insufficiently rooted in evidence, and his prose rather pompous. In short, the books are too woolly and full of purple prose. I once met the great man, when I was a graduate student at Harvard, and felt simply too short to be of any interest to him – so maybe that explains my antipathy.

Still, his emphasis on the link between economics and politics is certainly right, and so well worth taking to heart is Galbraith's point about the gap between the romantic (Anglo-Saxon) view of the economy as a competitive field of small enterprises and the reality of large corporations wielding power. As he notes, the myth is an ideological one, and not one most economists subscribed to at the time – or now either, even if much of the profession was diverted down that path by the political spirit of the 1980s.