Everything about John Kenneth Galbraith totally explained
John Kenneth Galbraith OC (
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. His books on economic topics were bestsellers in the 1950s and 1960s.
Galbraith was a prolific author who produced four dozen books and over a thousand articles on various subjects. Among his most famous works was a popular trilogy on economics,
American Capitalism (1952),
The Affluent Society (1958), and
The New Industrial State (1967). He taught at
Harvard University for many years. Galbraith was active in politics, serving in the administrations of
Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Harry S. Truman,
John F. Kennedy and
Lyndon B. Johnson; and among other roles served as
United States Ambassador to India under Kennedy.
He was one of a few two-time recipients of the
Presidential Medal of Freedom. He received one from President Truman in 1946 and another from President
Bill Clinton in 2000. He was also awarded the
Order of Canada in 1997 and, in 2001, the
Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian award, for his contributions to strengthening ties between India and the United States.
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
Dunwich Township, Ontario. His father was a farmer and school teacher and mother a political activist. Both his parents were supporters of the
United Farmers of Ontario in the 1920s. 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. In 1934, he also became a tutor at
Harvard University. In 1937, he became a
United States citizen (at a time when neither the US nor Canada contemplated dual citizenship), but he was honoured by his native country to his life's end and frequently affirmed his Canadian origins. In the same year, he took a year-long fellowship at
Cambridge University,
England, where he became influenced by
John Maynard Keynes, then lived in
Berlin for several months in 1938, attending an international economic conference and developing his ideas. Galbraith was a very tall man, growing to a reported height of 6'9" [206cm].
Galbraith taught intermittently at Harvard in the period 1934 to 1939 . From 1939 to 1940, he taught at
Princeton University. From 1943 until 1948, he served as editor of
Fortune magazine. In 1949, he was appointed professor of economics at Harvard.
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 didn't 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 criticised
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.
In 1972 he served as president of the American Economic Association.
Family
Galbraith married Catherine Merriam Atwater on
September 17,
1937, whom he met while she was a Radcliffe student. They resided in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and had a summer home in
Newfane, Vermont. They had four sons: J. Alan Galbraith is a partner in the prominent Washington D.C. law firm
Williams & Connolly; Douglas Galbraith died in childhood of leukemia.
Peter W. 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;
James K. Galbraith is a prominent progressive economist at the University of Texas. The Galbraiths also have ten grandchildren.
(External Link
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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. S.
Presidential Medal of Freedom. Also in 2000, he was awarded the Leontief Prize for his outstanding contribution to economic theory by the
Global Development and Environment Institute.
Awarded honorary doctorate from Memorial University at the fall convocation of 1999.
On
April 29,
2006, Galbraith died at
Mount Auburn Hospital in
Cambridge, Massachusetts of natural causes, after a two-week stay in the hospital.
Works
Although he was a former president of the
American Economic Association, 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 couldn't 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're not amenable to axiomatic descriptions. 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 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 humour, into human behaviour 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, 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. 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 was a fine writer, and was widely regarded as an influential and serious economist. Many of Galbraith's best known works raised controversies, particularly with his antagonism toward
libertarians and those of the
Austrian schools (see Criticism).
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 mischievously."
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've 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 labour 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.
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.
Libertarian 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 shouldn't be allowed choice and that all should be determined by those with "higher minds":
» "Many reformers -- Galbraith isn't alone in this -- have as their basic objection to a free market that it frustrates them in achieving their reforms, because it enables people to have what they want, not what the reformers want. Hence every reformer has a strong tendency to be averse to a free market."
Galbraith defended government intervention as not imposing the will of reformers on the masses, but rather protecting them from corporate exploitation and manipulation, particularly through advertising and "manufactured demand," which are not considered in textbook models of free markets but, according to Galbraith, are prevalent in real economies.
Paul Krugman, the influential
Princeton University professor and
New York Times op-ed columnist, has denigrated Galbraith's stature as an economist. In
Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in an Age of Diminished Expectations, he calls Galbraith a "policy entrepreneur" — an economist who writes for solely the public, as opposed to one who writes for other professors, and who therefore makes unwarranted diagnoses and offers over-simplistic answers to complex economic problems. He asserts that Galbraith was never taken seriously by fellow academics, who view him as more of a "media personality." For example, Galbraith's work
The New Industrial State isn't considered to be "real economic theory", and
Economics in Perspective is "remarkably ill-informed".
Memoirs
The Scotch (published in the UK under two alternative titles as
Made to Last and
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 Dunwich and that he'd grown 'too big for his britches.' This resentment from the Dunwich community wasn't 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.
- A Theory of Price Control, 1952.
- , 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 McClandress 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)
- , 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.
- , (with Paul McCracken)1983.
- A View from the Stands, 1986.
- , 1987.
- Capitalism, Communism and Coexistence (with Stanislav Menshikov), 1988.
- , 1989. (Editor)
- A Tenured Professor, 1990.
- , 1991.
- The Culture of Contentment, 1992.
- , 1992. (Editor)
- A Journey Through Economic Time, 1994.
- , 1994.
- A Short History of Financial Euphoria, 1994.
- , 1996.
- Letters to Kennedy, 1998.
- The socially concerned today, 1998.
- , 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 isn't 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 didn't like taxation without representation. It is a lesser known and equally important fact that they didn't much like taxation with representation."
"Politics isn't the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
(On being asked what it's like having reached the age of 90) "Better than the alternative."
For more quotations, see the Wikiquote list on Galbraith.
Apocryphal Quotations
Some quotes have been falsely attributed to Galbraith in Internet signature files, and have thus become widespread, including:
"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite." (see (External Link)).
"Never underestimate the power of very stupid people in large groups."Further Information
Get more info on 'John Kenneth Galbraith'.
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