Galbraith, John Kenneth (1908-2006)

US economist J K Galbraith, photographed in about 1964. As a leading figure in national and institutional economics, much of his writing might be summed up as an endeavour to point out that, although many theories on the subject are commonly taken for granted by politicians, they may not actually work.

Canadian-born US economist. Considered a renegade by many of this peers, he criticized mainstream neo-classical economics, for example in his bestsellers American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (1952) and The Affluent Society (1958). Despite his controversial views, which included his belief in planning and more state control, his contempt for rigorous analysis, and his insistence that most economics is simple ‘conventional wisdom’, he became president of the American Economic Association in 1972.

American Capitalism became a best-seller, though its success was surpassed by The Affluent Society. Its contrast between ‘private affluence’ and ‘public squalor’ immediately entered into popular language. The effect of this book marked the beginning of the anti-growth movement that ushered in the war on poverty and the ecological movement of the late 1960s.

Born in Ontario, Canada, among Scottish-Canadian farmers, Galbraith received his first degree from Ontario Agricultural College. In 1932, he crossed the border to take up graduate studies in agricultural economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his PhD in 1936. He became a professor at Harvard University, where he studied industrial price rigidities, but left at the outbreak of World War II to head the Price Section of the Office of Price Administration.

After leaving the government in 1943, he alternated between the editorial board of Fortune magazine and the directorship of the US Strategic Bombing Survey. In 1949, he was back at Harvard as a professor, finally retiring in 1975. His other works include A Theory of Price Control (1952), The Great Crash 1929 (1954), The New Industrial State (1967), and Almost Everyone's Guide to Economics (1978; with N Salinger). He served as US ambassador to India 1961-63 and received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1946 and 2000.