John Kenneth Galbraith
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John Kenneth Galbraith (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 U.S. 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[1]. He was also awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian award, for his contributions to strengthening ties between India and the United States.[2].
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[edit] Life
[edit] 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 Dutton, 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 adverted to his Canadian origins[citation needed]. In the same year, he took a year-long fellowship at Cambridge University, England, where he became influenced by John Maynard Keynes. Galbraith was a very tall man, growing to a reported height of 6'9" [206 cm].
Galbraith taught intermittently at Harvard in the period 1934 to 1939 [3]. 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.
[edit] World War II and Price Administration
During World War II, Galbraith was America's "price czar," charged with keeping inflation from crippling the war effort. He 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 did not 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.
[edit] Political posts under Kennedy
During his time as an adviser to President John F. Kennedy, Galbraith was appointed as U.S. 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, as to 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 demitting office, Galbraith remained a friend and supporter of India and even hosted a lunch for Indian students at Harvard every year on graduation day.
In 1972 he served as president of the American Economic Association.
[edit] 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[4] 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.
On April 29, 2006, Galbraith died at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts of natural causes, after a two-week stay in the hospital.
[edit] 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 leukaemia. 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. The Galbraiths also have ten grandchildren. [1]
[edit] 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 could not 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 are 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. 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.
[edit] 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.
In his most famous work, The Affluent Society (1958), which 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 claims to have coined the phrase "conventional wisdom." (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.[5]
The Affluent Society contributed (likely to a significant degree, given that Galbraith had the ear of President Kennedy [6]) 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. Critics point out that Galbraith misses a larger truth- that bubbles are characterized by insufficient availability of price information.
Although Galbraith was a fine writer, he was not widely regarded as a serious economist, and most of his ideas are considered wrong today. Many of Galbraith's best known works raised controversies, particularly with 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[7].
Galbraith cherished The New Industrial State and The Affluent Society as his two best.[8] 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." [9]
[edit] 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 have moved from a state of poverty into 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 it generates artificial affluence through the production of commercial goods and services, the "public sector" becomes neglected as a result. He pointed 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 artificial demand above individual's basic needs.
He proposed curbing the consumption of certain products through greater use of consumption taxes, arguing this could be more efficient than other forms of taxes 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.
[edit] 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.
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 should not be allowed choice and that all should be determined by those with "higher minds":
- "Many reformers -- Galbraith is not 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."
[edit] 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)[10] (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 Dutton and that he had grown 'too big for his britches.'[citation needed] This resentment from the Dutton community was not as prevalent in later years.
Galbraith's 1981 memoir, A Life in Our Times[11] 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[12] by friend and fellow progressive economist Richard Parker, renewed interest in his career and ideas.
[edit] Bibliography
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[edit] Quotations
- "Humility is not 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."
- "It is a well known and very important fact that America's founding fathers did not like taxation without representation. It is a lesser known and equally important fact that they did not much like taxation with representation."
- "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
- (On being asked what it is like having reached the age of 90) "Better than the alternative."
For more quotations, see the Wikiquote list on Galbraith.
[edit] 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 [2] and the talk page).
- "Never underestimate the power of very stupid people in large groups."
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Liberal thinker JK Galbraith dies, an April 2006 BBC article
- ^ Galbraith receives prestigious award, a June 2001 Harvard News Gazette article
- ^ John Kenneth Galbraith, Longtime Economics Professor, Dies at 97, an April 2006 Harvard Crimson article
- ^ Order of Canada citation, from the website of the Governor General of Canada
- ^ Galbraith interview with Colonel Anil Athale (retd), July 2003
- ^ John Kenneth Galbraith, 97, Dies; Economist, Diplomat and Writer a New York Times obituary from April 30, 2006
- ^ Political Economy: The Contest of Economic Ideas, 2002, by Frank Stilwell
- ^ Adams, Philip (1999), Interview on Radio National, Late Night Live, Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Accessed 17 Jan 2006.
- ^ Sharpe, Michael (2006), John Kenneth Galbraith, 1908-2006, Challenge: the Magazine of Economic Affairs, 49 (4):7
- ^ ISBN 0-395-39382-5
- ^ ISBN 0-395-31135-7
- ^ Promotional website for John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics
[edit] Sources
- Robert Sobel The Worldly Economists (1980).
[edit] External links
- Article on John Kenneth Galbraith, the Affluent Society, and Social Capital
- Short Galbraith biography at encyclopedia.com
- Galbraith biography at econlib.org
- The History of Economic Thought Profile
- John Kenneth Galbraith's campaign contributions
- John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)
- "John Kenneth Galbraith, 97, Dies; Economist Held a Mirror to Society", The New York Times, April 30, 2006.
- "John Kenneth Galbraith, writer, economist, dies", The Boston Globe, April 30, 2006.
- "John Kenneth Galbraith; Popularized Modern Economics", The Washington Post, May 1, 2006.
- CBC Obituary
- Associated Press Obituary via USA Today
- Influential economist Galbraith dies at 97 Alternate AP obituary
- Harvard University's Obituary "John Kenneth Galbraith, economist, professor, and author: Harvard icon dies at 97"
- News story and biography from the Medal of Freedom website, on the 2004 award of his second medal.
- John Kenneth Galbraith dies Dollars & Sense, May 3, 2006.
- J.K. Galbraith Celebrated Power, Not Freedom Ludwig von Mises Institute, May 15th, 2006
- John Kenneth Galbraith At Find A Grave
Categories: Articles with unsourced statements since February 2007 | All articles with unsourced statements | 1908 births | 2006 deaths | Ambassadors of the United States | American economists | Canadian-born United States political figures | Economists | Institutional economists | Canadian economists | Harvard University faculty | Keynesian economics | Liberalism | Members of The American Academy of Arts and Letters | Members of the Order of Canada | Naturalized citizens of the United States | Padma Vibhushan recipients | People from Boston | People from Elgin County, Ontario | Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients | University of California, Berkeley alumni | University of Toronto alumni
