John Kenneth Galbraith

The Galbraith farm stood on Thomson Line in Dunwich Township, Ontario, and the boy went to a one-room school on Willey Road. By his teens he had dropped John for Ken and he disliked the full name ever after. His father farmed, taught school, ran a cooperative insurance company and worked the local Liberal Party. His mother died when he was 14. In 1931 he took a degree in agriculture from the Ontario Agricultural College, majoring in animal husbandry, and a scholarship worth 60 dollars a month carried him to Berkeley, where the doctorate was in agricultural economics. Harvard hired him as an instructor in 1934. He became an American citizen in 1937 and spent a year at Cambridge, where Keynes got hold of him.

From 1941 he ran price control at the Office of Price Administration, setting every price, wage and rent in an economy that quadrupled in under five years without the inflation that had wrecked the previous war. He called it his best work. Business and conservatives in Congress forced him out in May 1943 on a charge of communistic tendencies, and Henry Luce hired him at Fortune, where he stayed five years explaining Keynes to American executives. In 1945 he served on the Strategic Bombing Survey and found that German war production had risen while the cities burned, a conclusion he had to fight the Pentagon to publish. Then Harvard for half a century, the books, and the embassy in New Delhi from 1961 to 1963 under Kennedy, from which he argued against every escalation in Southeast Asia.

The books sold in the millions and the discipline shrugged. Milton Friedman read him as a Tory radical who distrusted ordinary people's choices and wanted the high-minded to make them instead. Robert Solow, reviewing The New Industrial State, wrote that arguing over the literal truth of its claims was like debating whether there really are little people in Gulliver's Travels. Paul Krugman filed him in 1994 among the policy entrepreneurs — writers who address the public rather than other economists — and said his colleagues had never taken him seriously and did not regard The New Industrial State as economic theory. Galbraith gave English the conventional wisdom, countervailing power and the technostructure. Friedman, Solow and Krugman all took the Nobel in economics. He did not.

He died in Cambridge on April 29, 2006, at 97, after a two-week stay in hospital, and is buried at Indian Hill Cemetery in Middletown, Connecticut. Three days before the end he told his son James to write a short book about corporate predation, and James published The Predator State two years later. The professional verdict has not moved much: his models sit outside the mainstream and are not taught as theory. The phrases outlived the models. So did the central complaint of The Affluent Society, that a country can grow rich in private while its public goods rot, which gets restated in every downturn by people who have never opened the book.

John Kenneth Galbraith's life against the full span of the corpus.

• American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power book
  Unions and regulation as the balance against big business 1952
• The Great Crash, 1929 book
  His account of the speculative collapse 1955
• The Affluent Society book
  The book that put conventional wisdom into the language 1958
• The Scotch book
  On the Ontario township he was raised in 1964
• The New Industrial State book
  The technostructure — corporations shaping demand rather than answering it 1967
• A Life in Our Times book
  The memoir 1981

• 1931 aged ~23 Graduates in agriculture from the Ontario Agricultural College His major was animal husbandry.
• 1934 aged ~26 Takes a Berkeley doctorate in agricultural economics and joins Harvard as an instructor
• September 17, 1937 aged 28 Marries Catherine Merriam Atwater and becomes an American citizen The marriage lasted 68 years.
• May 1943 aged 34 Forced out of the Office of Price Administration The charge was communistic tendencies. Henry Luce hired him at Fortune.
• 1945 aged ~37 Reports that German war production rose under Allied bombing He had to fight to publish it without rewriting.
• 1947 aged ~39 Helps found Americans for Democratic Action With Eleanor Roosevelt and Hubert Humphrey, among others.
• 1958 aged ~50 Publishes The Affluent Society
• April 18, 1961 aged 52 Becomes United States Ambassador to India He wrote to Kennedy directly, around the State Department, and argued against Vietnam from Delhi.
• April 29, 2006 aged 97 Dies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at 97

• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. served
• Henry Luce 1898–1967
  Magazine publisher whose Time — Life and Fortune defined mid-century American newsweekly formats. employer at Fortune
• Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962
  First Lady and human rights advocate who chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration. co-founded the ADA with
• Paul Krugman b. 1953
  Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist known for his work on trade and geography. dismissed by
• Thorstein Veblen 1857–1929
  Founded institutional economics and coined conspicuous consumption in The Theory of the Leisure Class. intellectual ancestor
• Lyndon B. Johnson 1908–1973
  36th President who signed the Civil Rights Act and launched the Great Society programs. warned him off Vietnam