John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006), American economist. Galbraith’s works, especially The Affluent Society (1958), were influential beyond his field. He was known for his criticism of what he saw as rampant American consumerism and the rise of corporate power at the expense of community and social services.

John Kenneth Galbraith was born on a farm in Ontario, Canada. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto and then master’s and doctoral degrees in economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Galbraith taught economics from 1934 to 1942, first at Harvard University and later at Princeton University. He served with the National Defense Advisory Committee, the Office of Price Administration, and with several other federal agencies of the United States.

From 1943 to 1948 Galbraith was a member of the editorial board of Fortune magazine. In 1949 he returned to Harvard as a professor of economics, a post he would retain for the remainder of his academic career. From 1961 to 1963, on leave from Harvard, he served as U.S. ambassador to India.

A prolific and lucid writer on economics, Galbraith wrote American Capitalism (1951), a discussion of the balance of economic power among major U.S. companies. In The Affluent Society (1958), he argued that the United States had reached a stage in its economic development that should enable the country to direct its resources toward providing better public services rather than the production of consumer goods. The book became a bestseller and made Galbraith famous.

Galbraith’s other books include The Great Crash: 1929 (1955), The New Industrial State (1967), Ambassador's Journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy Years (1969), A China Passage and Economics and the Public Purpose (both 1973), The Culture of Contentment (1992), A Journey Through Economic Time (1994), The Good Society (1996), and The Economics of Innocent Fraud (2004). Among his novels is A Tenured Professor (1990), which is set in a university economics department. In 2000 Galbraith was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.