John Kenneth Galbraith - Life, Works

Economist, born in Iona Station, Ontario, SE Canada. He studied economics at the universities of California, Berkeley, and Cambridge, England, and became professor of economics at Harvard (1948–75, then emeritus), where he spent his career, except for a short period at Princeton, wartime service in Washington, and two years (1961–3) as US ambassador to India. He was a key adviser to presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and one of the major intellectual forces in American liberalism, questioning the conventional wisdom of US economic policies and calling for less emphasis on production and more attention to public services. His books included American Capitalism: the Concept of Countervailing Power (1952), The Affluent Society (1958), The New Industrial State (1967), The Age of Uncertainty (1977, also TV series), A History of Economics (1987), The Great Society (1997), and The Economics of Innocent Fraud (2004).

John Kenneth Galbraith (October 15, 1908–April 29, 2006) was an influential Canadian-American economist of the 20th century.

Galbraith was a prolific author, producing four dozen books and over a thousand articles on various subjects. His most famous works were perhaps a popular trilogy of books on economics, American Capitalism (1952), The Affluent Society (1958), and The New Industrial State (1967). Galbraith was also active in politics, serving in the administrations of Franklin D.

He was one of the few two-time recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, receiving one from President Truman in 1946 and another from President Bill Clinton in 2000.

Life

Early life and teaching

Galbraith was born to Canadians of Scottish descent, William Archibald Galbraith and Sarah Catherine Kendall, in Iona Station, Ontario, Canada and was raised in Dutton, Ontario. After initially studying agriculture, Galbraith graduated from the Ontario Agricultural College (then affiliated with the University of Toronto, and now the University of Guelph) with a B.Sc degree in 1931, and then received an M.Sc (1933) and Ph.D in Agricultural Economics (1934) from the University of California, Berkeley. Galbraith was a very tall man, growing to a reported height of 6'9".

Galbraith taught intermittently at Harvard in the period 1934 to 1939 .

WWII and Price Administration

During World War II, Galbraith was America's "price czar," charged with keeping inflation from crippling the war effort.

Political posts under Kennedy

During his time as an adviser to President John F. Kennedy, Galbraith was appointed as U.S. ambassador to India from 1961 to 1963. Even after demitting office, Galbraith remained a friend and supporter of India and even hosted a lunch for Indian students at Harvard every year on graduation day.

In 1972 he served as president of the American Economic Association.

Later life and recognition

Galbraith was one of the last living former advisers to President Franklin Roosevelt.

In 1997 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and in 2000 he was awarded his second U.

On April 29, 2006, Galbraith died at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts of natural causes, after a two-week stay in the hospital.

Family

Galbraith married Catherine Merriam Atwater on September 17, 1937, whom he met while she was a Radcliffe student. Alan Galbraith is a partner in the prominent Washington D.C. Douglas Galbraith died in childhood of leukaemia. Galbraith has been a US diplomat who served as Ambassador to Croatia and is a widely published commentator on American foreign policy - particularly in the Balkans and the Middle East; Galbraith is a prominent progressive economist. The Galbraiths also have ten grandchildren.

Works

Although he was a former president of the American Economic Association, Galbraith was considered an iconoclast by many economists. In this sense, he worked as much in political economy as in classical economics.

His work included several best selling works throughout the fifties and sixties. After his retirement, he remained in the public consciousness by continuing to write new books and revise his old works.

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.

In his most famous work, The Affluent Society (1958), which 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. (Galbraith, 1958 The Affluent Society: Chapter 2 "The Concept of Conventional Wisdom")

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.

Many of Galbraith's best known works are controversial, particularly to libertarian and those of the Austrian schools who disagree with many of his assertions (see Controversy).

He was an important figure in 20th-century institutional economics, and provides perhaps the exemplar institutionalist perspective on Economic Power.

Galbraith cherished The New Industrial State and The Affluent Society as his two best. Economist and friend of Galbraith Michael Sharpe visited Galbraith in 2004, on which occasion Galbraith gifted him with a copy of what would be Galbraith's last book, The Economics of Innocent Fraud. Galbraith confided in Sharpe that "[t]his is my best book", an assertion Galbraith delivered "a little mischieviously."

Some of Galbraith's 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 a state of poverty into 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 it generates artificial affluence through the production of commercial goods and services, the "public sector" becomes neglected as a result.

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

Galbraith's major proposal was a program he called "investment in men" - a large-scale governmental education program to influence the wants and tastes of the citizenry. Galbraith wished to entrust the future of the American republic into the hands of the members of this class, asserting that their ability to see beyond "the conventional wisdom" entitled them to govern.

Criticism of Galbraith's Work

Galbraith's work and The Affluent Society in particular drew sharp criticism from free-market supporters at the time of its publication.

Author and capitalism advocate Ayn Rand stated that "Galbraith advocates...

Libertarian Murray Rothbard in his detailed criticisms of the Affluent Society in Man, Economy and State summarized that it is "replete with fallacies ... He characterized much of Galbraith's writing (particularly his references to "conventional wisdom") as a "sustained sneer".

Milton Friedman in "Friedman on Galbraith, and on curing the British disease" views Galbraith as a 20th-century version of the early 19th-century Tory radical of Great Britain. He asserts that Galbraith believes in the superiority of aristocracy and in its paternalistic authority, that consumers should not be allowed choice and that all should be determined by those with "higher minds":

Memoirs

The Scotch (published in the UK as The Non-potable Scotch: A Memoir of the Clansmen in Canada) (illustrated by Samuel H. Bryant), Galbraith's account of his boyhood environment in southern Ontario, was written in 1963. Some members of his boyhood community claimed that Galbraith had misrepresented the town of Dutton and that he had grown 'too big for his britches.' This resentment from the Dutton community was not as prevalent in later years.

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 authorised 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. The Great Crash, 1929, 1954. The Affluent Society, 1958. (Editor) The Liberal Hour, 1960 Economic Development in Perspective, 1962. The Scotch, 1963 Economic Development, 1964. The New Industrial State, 1967. The Triumph (a novel), 1968. John Kenneth Galbraith introduces India, 1974. The Economic effects of the Federal public works expenditures, 1933-38, (with G. The Age of Uncertainty (also a BBC 13 part television series), 1977.

The Galbraith Reader, 1977. The Nature of Mass Poverty, 1979. The Voice of the Poor, 1983. The Anatomy of Power, 1983. The Culture of Contentment, 1992. The World Economy Since the Wars: A Personal View, 1994. The Good Society: the humane agenda, 1996. The socially concerned today, 1998. The Essential Galbraith, 2001. The Economics of Innocent Fraud, 2004. John Kenneth Galbraith and the future of economics, 2005. (regarding the Nixon administration's suggestion that the addition of Laos as an ally in the Vietnam War would significantly help the US win the war) "The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking." – widely attributed to Galbraith in Internet signature files, but not original to him (, also see talk). Sources Robert Sobel The Worldly Economists (1980).