John Kenneth Galbraith (born October 15, 1908) is a prominent Canadian-American economist. The author of many books and articles, he has been on the faculty of Harvard University since 1949. From 1961 to 1963, he served as Ambassador to India. Galbraith is considered something of an iconoclast among North American economists; an "old-fashioned" Keynesian with progressive values and a gift for writing accessible, popular books on economic topics in which he describes ways in which economic theory does not always mesh with real life.

Life

Galbraith was born in Iona Station , Ontario. He graduated from the Ontario Agricultural College (now University of Guelph) and then got an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.

During World War II, Galbraith served as deputy head of the Office of Price Administration. At the end of the war, he was asked to carry out a survey of US and allied strategic bombing, and concluded that it served no use and did not shorten the war. After the war, he became an advisor to post-war administrations in Germany and Japan.

In 1949, Galbraith was appointed professor of economics at Harvard University. He also served as editor of Fortune.

He was a friend of President John F. Kennedy and was appointed by Kennedy as U.S. ambassador to India from 1961 to 1963. There he attempted to aid the Indian government with developing its economy. While in India, he helped establish one of the first computer sciences department at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh .

In 1997 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Works

In American Capitalism: The concept of countervailing power, a seminal work published in 1952, Galbraith outlines how the American economy in the future would be managed by a triumvirate of big business, big labour, and an activist government. He contrasted this with the previous pre-depression era where big business had free rein over the economy.

In another work, The Affluent Society, which became a bestseller, Galbraith outlines his view that to be successful the United States would need to make large public investments in items such as highways and education. In this work, he says, he coined the phrase "conventional wisdom." In The New Industrial State (1967), he argues that very few industries in the United States fit the model of perfect competition. The third work in this triumvirate 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.

Galbraith's son, James K. Galbraith, is also a prominent economist.

Quotes

• "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof."
• "If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows." - in relation to trickle-down economics
• "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."
• "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."
• "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."

Partial 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.
• The Affluent Society, 1958.
• The Liberal Hour, 1960
• The New Industrial State, 1967.
• The Triumph (a novel), 1968.
• Ambassador's Journal, 1969.
• Economics, Peace and Laughter, 1972.
• Power and the Useful Economist, 1973, AER
• Economics and the Public Purpose, 1973
• Money, 1975.
• The Age of Uncertainty (also a BBC 13 part television series), 1977.
• Annals of an Abiding Liberal, 1979.
• A Life in Our Times, 1981.
• A Tenured Professor, 1990.
• A Journey Through Economic Time, 1994.
• The Good Society: the humane agenda, 1996.
• The Economics of Innocent Fraud, 2004.
• The Nature of Mass Poverty
• Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went

See also

• Liberalism
• List of liberal thinkers
• The Best and the Brightest

External links

• econlib.org biography
• John Kenneth Galbraith Biography