Galbraith, John Kenneth (1908–2006)

John Kenneth Galbraith was the most important public economist of the decades after World War II and up until the 1970s. He wrote over forty books, of which a number—perhaps most notably The Affluent Society (1958)—are regarded as being among the most widely read books ever written by modern economists. Galbraith's most famous and accessible works have since become recognized as fostering changes in social values and being important precursors to current social attitudes toward the side effects of economic production and growth, consumerism, the power of corporations, and the influence of advertising. His most important works were characterized by a maverick style, clarity of thought and expression, and the capacity to generate memorable, incisive concepts that formed the basis of his reputation as a slayer of the myths of modern economic thought. Many have compared his incisive style of critique to the noted sociologist Thorstein Veblen, author of The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Galbraith himself admitted to being a fan of Veblen's famous work.

In an era of rapid social change and economic growth, Galbraith led an extraordinary life and was renowned for his wit, work ethic, and eloquence. He was a long-time and popular professor of economics at Harvard University, was an advisor to numerous U.S. presidents, served as U.S. ambassador to India, was an influential public intellectual in the United States, and also wrote a handful of novels. Along with being an important public intellectual, Galbraith was an academic celebrity. In his popular writings and public appearances, he was an unrelenting advocate of both liberal values and a critical version of economics. He wrote and narrated a thirteen-part television series on modern life and economic thought called The Age of Uncertainty. He also wrote a series of novels, which were broadly biographical (such as A Tenured Professor, 1990), and a book on Indian painting, which derived from his time as U.S. ambassador to India, and he was a contributor to newspapers and magazines as diverse as The New York Times and Playboy. Because of this diverse array of interests, Galbraith divided the opinions of those in his profession. Though he was elected president of the American Economic Association (1972) and was a professor of economics at Harvard University for nearly three decades, his interest in challenging economic orthodoxy and applying economic thinking to burning social and political questions often distanced him from some of the technical and mathematical czars of his discipline.

Born in Ontario, Canada, Galbraith studied agriculture at the Ontario Agricultural College before moving to take up graduate studies in the field of agricultural economics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1932. After completion of his PhD, he took up an instructorship at Harvard University in 1936. At the start of World War II, he worked in the Office of Price Administration. From 1948, he became professor of economics at Harvard University, where he divided his time between his residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and, during nonterm time, what he called his “unfarmed farm” near Newfane, [Page 624]Vermont. Retiring from Harvard in 1975, he continued to write many popular books, critical and liberal in tone, intellectually sound and easily understandable in style, which continued to endear him to the public and sections of the economics profession. In 2000, Galbraith received the Medal of Freedom from President Clinton. His final book, The Economics of Innocent Fraud, was published in 2004 when he was aged ninety-five.

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