J. K. Galbraith (John Kenneth Galbraith) Biography

American Keynesian, economist born in Ontario, Canada, educated at the universities of Toronto, California, and Cambridge. His distinguished career has ranged from academic posts (he was Professor of Economics at Harvard) to journalism (he edited Fortune), government service (he directed the Strategic Bombing Survey after the Second World War), and diplomat (he was United States Ambassador to India during the Kennedy administration). In his public interventions, he remains the foremost voice of a distinctive American brand of liberalism. In economics, his work is in the great tradition of American Institutionalism. Among the most widely read of his early publications are The Great Crash (1961), and his trilogy—American Capitalism (1952), The Affluent Society (1955), and The New Industrial State (1967)—in which disparities of power, wealth, and opportunity are eruditely exposed amongst other unpalatable realities of modern industrial society. Subsequent works include Economics and the Public Purpose (1973), The Nature of Mass Poverty (1979), The Anatomy of Power (1983), The Culture of Contentment (1992), and A Journey through Economic Time (1994). The lucidity with which he presents his subjects, combined with his wit, have contributed to his reputation as one of the most accessible and respected economists of the twentieth century; his television series of the mid-1970s, ‘The Age of Uncertainty’, brought him a wider audience and increased popularity.