John Kenneth Galbraith, who held a mirror to society, dies at 97

From the 1930s to the 1990s, he helped define the terms of the national political debate, influencing the direction of the Democratic Party and the thinking of its leaders. An imposing presence, lanky and angular at 6 feet 8 inches tall, he was consulted frequently by national leaders, and he gave advice freely, though it may have been ignored as often as it was taken.

Still, he advised President John F Kennedy and served as his ambassador to India. Though he eventually broke with President Lyndon B Johnson over Vietnam, he helped conceive Johnson’s Great Society programme and wrote a major presidential address that outlined its purposes. In 1968, pursuing his opposition to the war, he helped Senator Eugene J McCarthy seek the Democratic nomination for president. In course of his career, he undertook a number of government assignments, including the organization of price controls in World War II and speechwriting for Franklin D Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson. In fact, after Kennedy won the presidency in 1960, he appointed Galbraith the US ambassador to India. There were those, Galbraith among them, who believed the President had done this to get a potential loose cannon out of Washington. He said in his memoir: “Kennedy, I always believed, was pleased to have me in his administration, but at a suitable distance such as in India.”

Galbraith was fascinated with India; he had spent a year here in 1956 advising its government and was eager to return. He spent 27 months as ambassador, clashed with the State Department and was more favorably regarded as a diplomat by those outside the government.

He fought for increased American military and economic aid for India and acted as a sort of informal adviser to the Indian government on economic policy. Known by his staff as “The Great Mogul,” he achieved an excellent rapport with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and other senior officials in the government. During the border war with China in 1962, Ambassador Galbraith effectively took charge of both the American military and the diplomatic response. He saw to it that India received restrained American help and took it upon himself to announce that the US recognized India’s disputed northern borders. The reason he had so much control over the American response, he said, was that the border fighting occurred during the far more consequential Cuban missile crisis, and no one at the highest levels at the White House, the State Department or the Pentagon was readily responding to his cables.

Galbraith published Ambassador’s Journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy Years, a book based on the diary he kept during his time in India, in 1969. A year earlier he published Indian Painting: The Scenes, Themes and Legends, which he wrote with Mohinder Singh Randhawa. An avid champion of Indian art, he donated much of his collection to the Harvard University Art Museums.

John Kenneth Galbraith was born on October 15, 1908, in Dunwich Township in southern Ontario, Canada, the only son of William Archibald and Catherine Kendall Galbraith. His father was a farmer and schoolteacher.

Galbraith said he inherited his liberalism, his interest in politics and his wit from his father. When he was about 8, he once recalled, he would join his father at political rallies. At one event, he wrote in his 1964 memoir The Scotch, his father mounted a large pile of manure to address the crowd. “He apologized with ill-concealed sincerity for speaking from the Tory platform,” Galbraith related. At age 18 he enrolled at Ontario Agricultural College. Later, he completed his undergraduate work at the University of Toronto and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his master’s degree in 1933 and his doctorate in agricultural economics in 1934.

In 1937, Galbraith married Catherine Merriam Atwater, the daughter of a prominent New York lawyer and a linguist. He became an American citizen and taught economics at Princeton in 1939. At his death Galbraith was the Paul M Warburg emeritus professor of economics at Harvard, where he had taught for most of his career. He served as president of the American Economic Association, the profession’s highest honor, and was elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Many viewed Galbraith as the leading scion of the American institutionalist school of economics, commonly associated with Thorstein Veblen and his idea of “conspicuous consumption”. Some, therefore, said Galbraith might best be called an “economic sociologist”. Some suggested that Galbraith’s liberalism crippled his influence.

In a review of John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics by Richard Parker, J Bradford DeLong wrote that Galbraith’s lifelong sermon of social democracy was destined to fail in a land of “rugged individualism”. He compared Galbraith to Sisyphus, endlessly pushing the same rock up a hill that always turns out to be too steep.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen maintains Galbraith not only reached but also defined the summit of his field. In the 2000 commencement address at Harvard, Parker’s book recounts, Sen said the influence of The Affluent Society was so pervasive that its many piercing insights were taken for granted. “It’s like reading Hamlet and deciding it’s full of quotations,” he said.

Other economists, even many of his fellow liberals, did not generally share his views. “The distinctiveness of his contribution appears to be slipping from view,” Stephen P Dunn wrote in The Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics in 2002. Criticism did not sit well with Galbraith, who would respond his critics had rightly recognised that his ideas were “deeply subversive of the established orthodoxy.” “As a matter of vested interest, if not of truth,” he added, “they were compelled to resist.”

A major influence on Galbraith was the caustic social commentary he found in Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. Galbraith called Veblen one of American history’s most astute social scientists, but also acknowledged that he tended to be overcritical.

“I’ve thought to resist this tendency,” Galbraith said, “but in other respects, Veblen’s influence on me has lasted long. One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read.” Galbraith completed two books in 1952, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power and A Theory of Price Control. In American Capitalism, he set out to debunk myths about the free market economy and explore concentrations of economic power. He summarized the lessons of his days at the Office of Price Administration in A Theory of Price Control, later calling it the best book he ever wrote. “The only difficulty is that five people read it. Maybe 10. I made up my mind that I would never again place myself at the mercy of the technical economists who had the enormous power to ignore what I had written.” His two next books were aimed at a large general audience. Both were best sellers.

In The Great Crash 1929, (1955) he recalled the mistakes of an earlier day and suggested that some were being repeated. As the book appeared, Galbraith testified at a Senate hearing and said that another crash was inevitable. The stock market dropped sharply that day, and he was widely blamed.

In The New Industrial State, he tried to trace the shift of power from the landed aristocracy through industrialists to the technical and managerial experts of modern corporations. He called for a new class of intellectuals and professionals to determine policy.

In 1977 he wrote and narrated ‘The Age of Uncertainty,’ a 13-part TV series surveying 200 years of economic theory and practice. In 1990 he wrote A Tenured Professor. In 1996, as he approached his 90th year, he wrote The Good Society. The Essential Galbraith (2001), was a collection of essays and excerpts. Another, Name-Dropping from FDR (1999), recounted encounters with the powerful, including President Kennedy’s response when Galbraith complained that an article in The New York Times had described him as arrogant. Kennedy retorted that he didn’t see why it shouldn’t: “Everybody else does.”

In 2004, at the age of 95, he published The Economics of Innocent Fraud, a short book that questioned much of the standard economic wisdom. “Let there be a coalition of the concerned,” he urged. “The affluent would still be affluent, the comfortable still comfortable, but the poor would be part of the political system.”

HOLCOMB B NOBLE & DOUGLAS MARTIN