He saw much and advised and entertained many during his long life. For starters, Galbraith was one of the last living former advisers to President Franklin Roosevelt. At mid-life, he taught President John F. Kennedy while Kennedy was still in college. And in later life, his friend Gloria Steinem said of him,  "We'd be sitting by the fire at his home in Vermont and he still spoke with semicolons. But he smiled."

Galbraith knew many American Presidents -- and spoke and wrote freely about them including a book about Reaganomics. He also lambasted, then later praised, Lyndon Johnson. President Bill Clinton, in 2000, awarded Galbraith the Medal of Freedom. It was his second -- the first coming from Harry S. Truman.

At Galbraith's funeral, Derek C. Bok, former Harvard president, said Mr. Galbraith, who was a longtime professor at the university, had asked to retire at 65 to pave the way for young professors. Galbraith advised the university on its stock portfolio and, in the early 1970's, predicted that it was about to lose money, and asked that he not receive further salary increases.

"You may laugh," Dr. Bok said, "but I assure you that letter has never been duplicated since."

John Kenneth Galbraith (October 15, 1908–April 29, 2006) was an influential Canadian-American economist. He was a Keynesian and an institutionalist, a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism and progressivism, and his books on economic topics were bestsellers in the 1950s and 1960s. Among his most famous works was a popular trilogy on economics, American Capitalism (1952), The Affluent Society (1958), and The New Industrial State (1967).

But his appeal was not only as an economist and presidential advisor. Galbraith was also a prolific author who produced four dozen books and over a thousand articles on various subjects. Many of his books were novels, including The Triumph and A Tenured Professor.

World War II and Price Administration

During World War II, Galbraith, charged with keeping inflation from crippling the war effort, served as deputy head of the Office of Price Administration. Although little appreciated at the time, the actual power he wielded in this position was so great that he joked later that the rest of his career had been downhill.

At the end of the war, he was asked to be one of the leaders of the Strategic Bombing Surveys of both Europe and Japan. These reports concluded the costs outweighed the anticipated benefits and did not shorten the war in the case of Germany. But, that the war against Japan had proved beyond question the success of bombing and went on to call for additional funding and the creation of an independent American Air Force (AAF). After the war, he became an adviser to post-war administrations in Germany and Japan.

Political posts under Kennedy

During his time as an adviser to President John F. Kennedy, Galbraith was appointed as United States Ambassador to India from 1961 to 1963. There he became an intimate of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and extensively advised the Indian government on economic matters; he harshly criticized Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of British rule, for Mountbatten's passive role in the Partition of India in 1947 and the bloody partition of the Punjab and Bengal.

While in India, he helped establish one of the first computer science departments, at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh. Even after leaving office, Galbraith remained a friend and supporter of India and even hosted a lunch for Indian students at Harvard every year on graduation day.

It was due to his recommendation that First Lady of the United States Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy undertook her diplomatic missions in India and Pakistan.

His Works

Although he was a former president of the American Economic Association (1972), Galbraith was considered an iconoclast by many economists. This is because he rejected the technical analyses and mathematical models of neoclassical economics as being divorced from reality.

Rather, following Thorstein Veblen, he believed that economic activity could not be distilled into inviolable laws, but rather was a complex product of the cultural and political milieu in which it occurs. In particular, he believed that important factors such as advertising, the separation between corporate ownership and management, oligopoly, and the influence of government and military spending had been largely neglected by most economists because they are not amenable to axiomatic descriptions. In this sense, he worked as much in political economy as in classical economics.

After his retirement, he remained in the public consciousness by continuing to write new books and revise his old works as well as presenting a major series on economics for BBC television in 1977.

However, from the Nixon presidency onwards, he was regarded as something of an anachronism, as the public discourse centered more and more around the pro-market, small-government, anti-regulation and low-tax orthodoxies which came to prominence in the 1980s. In addition to his books, he wrote hundreds of essays and a number of novels. Among his novels, A Tenured Professor in particular achieved critical acclaim.

Economics books

In American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power, published in 1952, Galbraith outlined how the American economy in the future would be managed by a triumvirate of big business, big labor, and an activist government. Galbraith termed the reaction of lobby groups and unions "countervailing power." He contrasted this arrangement with the previous pre-depression era where big business had relatively free rein over the economy.

His 1954 bestseller The Great Crash, 1929 describes the famous Wall Street melt-down of stock prices and how markets progressively become decoupled from reality in a speculative boom. The book is also a platform for Galbraith's keen insights and humor into human behavior when wealth is threatened. It has never been out of print.

In his most famous work, The Affluent Society (1958), which also became a bestseller, Galbraith outlined his view that to become successful, post-World War II America should make large investments in items such as highways and education using funds from general taxation.

Galbraith also critiqued the assumption that continually increasing material production is a sign of economic and societal health. Because of this, Galbraith is sometimes considered one of the first post-materialists. In this book, he popularized the phrase "conventional wisdom," sometimes erroneously supposed to have been coined by him. Galbraith worked on the book while in Switzerland, and had originally titled it Why The Poor Are Poor but changed it to The Affluent Society at his wife's suggestion.

The Affluent Society contributed (likely to a significant degree, given that Galbraith had the ear of President Kennedy) to the "war on poverty," the government spending policy first brought on by the administrations of Kennedy and Johnson.

In The New Industrial State (1967), Galbraith argues that very few industries in the United States fit the model of perfect competition. A third related work was Economics and the Public Purpose (1973), in which he expanded on these themes by discussing, among other issues, the subservient role of women in the unrewarded management of ever-greater consumption, and the role of the technostructure in the large firm in influencing perceptions of sound economic policy aims.

In A Short History of Financial Euphoria (1990), he traces financial bubbles through several centuries, and cautions that what currently seems to be "the next great thing" may not be that great and may have quite irrational factors promoting it. In this book, Galbraith claims that a common factor in financial bubbles is easy access to borrowed money for speculation, but this is also true of growing economies.

Galbraith cherished The New Industrial State and The Affluent Society as his two best books.

Some Galbraithian Ideas

In The Affluent Society Galbraith asserts that classical economic theory was true for the eras before the present, which were times of "poverty"; now, however, we have moved from an age of poverty to an age of "affluence," and for such an age, a completely new economic theory is needed.

Galbraith's main argument is that as society becomes relatively more affluent, so private business must "create" consumer wants through advertising, and while this generates artificial affluence through the production of commercial goods and services, the public sector becomes neglected as a result. He points out that while many Americans were able to purchase luxury items, their parks were polluted and their children attended poorly maintained schools.

He argues that markets alone will underprovide (or fail to provide at all) for many public goods, whereas private goods are typically 'overprovided' due to the process of advertising, creating an artificial demand above the individual's basic needs.

Galbraith proposed curbing the consumption of certain products through greater use of consumption taxes, arguing that this could be more efficient than other forms of taxation, such as labor or land taxes.

Galbraith's major proposal was a program he called "investment in men" — a large-scale, publicly-funded education program aimed at empowering ordinary citizens. Galbraith wished to entrust citizens with the future of the American republic.

Memoirs

The Scotch (1963) is Galbraith's account of his boyhood environment in southern Ontario. (It was published in the UK under two alternative titles as Made to Last and The Non-Potable Scotch: A Memoir of the Clansmen in Canada).

Galbraith's 1981 memoir, A Life in Our Times, stimulated discussion of his thought, his life, and times after his retirement from academic life. In 2004, the publication of an authorized biography, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics by friend and fellow progressive economist Richard Parker, renewed interest in his career and ideas.

Bibliography

Modern Competition and Business Policy, 1938.
A Theory of Price Control, 1952.
American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power, 1952.
The Great Crash, 1929, 1954.
Economics and the Art of Controversy, 1955.
The Affluent Society, 1958.
Perspectives on conservation, 1958. (Editor)
The Liberal Hour, 1960
Economic Development in Perspective, 1962.
The Scotch, 1963
The McLandress Dimension, 1963 (pseudonym Mark Epernay)
Economic Development, 1964.
The New Industrial State, 1967.
Beginner's Guide to American Studies, 1967.
How to get out of Vietnam, 1967.
The Triumph (a novel), 1968.
Ambassador's Journal, 1969.
How to control the military, 1969.
Indian Painting (with Mohinder Singh Randhawa), 1969.
Who needs democrats, and what it takes to be needed, 1970.
American Left and Some British Comparisons, 1971.
Economics, Peace and Laughter, 1972.
Power and the Useful Economist, 1973, AER
Economics and the Public Purpose, 1973
A China Passage, 1973.
John Kenneth Galbraith introduces India, 1974. (Editor)
Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, 1975.
Socialism in rich countries and poor, 1975.
The Economic effects of the Federal public works expenditures, 1933-38, (with G. Johnson) 1975.
The Age of Uncertainty (also a BBC 13 part television series), 1977.
The Galbraith Reader, 1977.
Almost Everyone's Guide to Economics, 1978. (With Nicole Salinger.)
Annals of an Abiding Liberal, 1979.
The Nature of Mass Poverty, 1979.
A Life in Our Times, 1981.
The Voice of the Poor, 1983.
The Anatomy of Power, 1983.
Essays from the Poor to the Rich, 1983.
Reaganomics: Meaning, Means and Ends, (with Paul McCracken)1983.
A View from the Stands, 1986.
Economics in Perspective: A Critical History, 1987.
Capitalism, Communism and Coexistence (with Stanislav Menshikov), 1988.
Unconventional Wisdom: Essays on Economics in Honour of John Kenneth Galbraith, 1989. (Editor)
A Tenured Professor, 1990.
A History of Economics: The Past as the Present, 1991.
The Culture of Contentment, 1992.
Recollections of the New Deal: When People Mattered, 1992. (Editor)
A Journey Through Economic Time, 1994.
The World Economy Since the Wars: A Personal View, 1994.
A Short History of Financial Euphoria, 1994.
The Good Society: the humane agenda, 1996.
Letters to Kennedy, 1998.
The socially concerned today, 1998.
Name-Dropping: From F.D.R. On, 1999.
The Essential Galbraith, 2001.
The Economics of Innocent Fraud, 2004.
John Kenneth Galbraith and the future of economics, 2005.

Quotations

"The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled."
"Humility is not always compatible with truth."
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
“Trickle-down theory -- the less than elegant metaphor that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”
"It is a well-known and very important fact that America's founding fathers did not like taxation without representation. It is a lesser known and equally important fact that they did not much like taxation with representation." (From Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went)
"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
(On being asked what it is like having reached the age of 90) "Better than the alternative."

An Obituary

Galbraith Is Remembered as a Giant in Many Fields

By KATIE ZEZIMA
Published: June 1, 2006, The New York Times

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 31 — Over decades the world came to know John Kenneth Galbraith as a maverick economist, author and diplomat, towering in intellect and stature, lacking in modesty and holding steadfast to his liberal beliefs.

But to most of the nearly 1,000 people who attended a memorial service Wednesday afternoon for Mr. Galbraith, who died April 29 at age 97, he was also Ken, a man with a generous heart who liked single-malt scotch neat and heady intellectual discourse among friends, whom he made easily and kept for life.

Mr. Galbraith was, speakers at the two-hour service at Memorial Church at Harvard said, a force who constantly challenged authority, shaped and questioned the nation's economic philosophies, translated them for the masses and deplored war. He was also a champion of the young, a satirist and an institution in his Cambridge neighborhood, where he housed an undergraduate student each year. He also owned a farmhouse in Vermont and a chalet in Switzerland.

"He was the republic's most valuable subversive," wrote the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., in a piece originally published in The Washington Post and read by his son, Stephen Schlesinger. "Underneath his joy in combat, he was a do-gooder in the dark of night."

Gloria Steinem befriended Mr. Galbraith in the 1960's, years after meeting his wife, Catherine Atwater. Mr. Galbraith, who rose early to write for two or three hours each morning, published fiction works under the name Mark Epernay. Ms. Steinem, who cared for the manuscripts one winter while Mr. Galbraith skied in Switzerland, said he had seen the name Epernay on a wine bottle and used it.

While working in the White House under President John F. Kennedy, Mr. Galbraith used to beat staff members and reporters in the card game Pounce by telling of his adventures and playing his cards while his competitors were rapt in the tale, Ms. Steinem said. She said she believed that his generosity of spirit showed in his work.

Mr. Galbraith's biographer, Richard Parker, said he last saw him a few days before he died, and took Mr. Galbraith a Japanese translation of his biography. Although Mr. Galbraith did not speak Japanese, he told Mr. Parker, "Given the enormity of the subject I shall devote my remaining days to work," Mr. Parker said.

At Mr. Galbraith's funeral, Mr. Parker saw that the funeral home left the inventory tag on the coffin of Mr. Galbraith, who stood 6 feet 8 inches tall. It said his name and "oversized," Mr. Parker said.

"John Kenneth Galbraith, oversized," he said. "They got it just right."

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