US: An American economist who argued more than 40 years ago that the free market economy was a myth has died at the age of 97, writes Barry Stavro
John Kenneth Galbraith, a world-renowned American economist whose best-selling books challenged the idea that a surging economy was necessarily a measure of social excellence and urged governments to divert more wealth to social needs, has died at the age of 97.
Prof Galbraith died of natural causes at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Saturday, according to his son, Alan Galbraith.
His fame was cemented with the 1958 publication of The Affluent Society, a phrase that soon worked its way into the language, and The New Industrial State, a follow-up work published in 1967.
His books appeared at a time when America was without peer as an economic power, and Galbraith, an esteemed Harvard University professor, argued that the free market economy was a myth and that the 1,000 largest American corporations dominated both the economy and social life.
Giant corporations, he argued, essentially operated free of competition, often turning out frivolous goods for an ever increasingly consumer-minded society, while the capitalistic economy ignored more pressing social needs.
"Americans still have an extraordinary capacity to ignore poverty," Prof Galbraith told an interviewer in 1983. I am struck by our superb capacity to manufacture consumer gadgetry including electronic games versus our capacity to produce schools."
The Affluent Society was translated into a dozen languages and sold more than one million copies. It also helped influence a surge of federal spending on social programmes in the 1960s, in what came to be known as "The Great Society" during Lyndon B Johnson's presidency.
Prof Galbraith was a man of varied talents. He also worked as a journalist, and performed various roles in four Democratic administrations. He wrote more than 30 books, including fiction and a work on Indian art, but his celebrity was earned from his political and economic studies.
Galbraith's books were marked by a caustic wit and elegant prose that turned arcane economic theories into readily understood ideas. He retired from Harvard in 1975 but remained widely sought out despite his Keynesian theories having fallen somewhat from favour.
One economist wrote: "Mr Galbraith may sometimes be hard to take, but he is still worth taking."
Prof Galbraith was born on a modest cattle farm in Ontario, Canada, in 1908. He earned a doctorate in agricultural economics from UC Berkeley in 1934, becoming a naturalised US citizen in 1937. Like many of his fellow Keynesians, he went to work for Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal administration, trying to use economic theories as tools to fine-tune the economy.
In 1941 he was appointed deputy administrator of the Office of Price Administration in charge of fixing civilian prices on essential supplies that were rationed to help support the war effort. After a shaky start, Galbraith's price controls worked well, with Americans saving more and their money in turn helping finance the war.
In 1948 he returned to Harvard. His influence reached its zenith after The Affluent Society was published. The book's most widely quoted passage was a scathing attack on middle-class consumption: "The family which takes its mauve and cerise, air-conditioned, power-steered, and power-braked car out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter . . . They . . . spend the night at a park which is a menace to public health and morals. Just before dozing off on an air-mattress, beneath a nylon tent, amid the stench of decaying refuse, they may reflect vaguely on the curious unevenness of their blessings. Is this, indeed, the American genius?"
Time magazine dismissed the book as a "vague essay with the air of worried dinner-table conversation". But it caught the attention of John F Kennedy, whose administration he later served as ambassador to India.
For many, Prof Galbraith - who was 6 feet, 8 inches tall - literally and figuratively towered over his contemporaries. However, he never won the Nobel Prize for Economics.
Galbraith outlived most of his contemporaries and remained active writing about them. Among the many themes he tackled, the avarice and myopia of greedy investors was a recurrent one. "I'm inclined to think that fools and their money will always be separated," he wrote.