John Kenneth Galbraith, the iconoclastic economist, teacher and diplomat, and an unapologetically liberal member of the political and academic establishment, died Saturday at a hospital in Cambridge, Mass. He was 97.
Galbraith lived in Cambridge and at an “unfarmed farm” near Newfane, Vt. His death was confirmed by his son J. Alan Galbraith.
Galbraith was one of the most widely read authors in the history of economics; among his books was “The Affluent Society” (1958), one of those rare works that forces a nation to re-examine its values. He wrote fluidly, even on complex topics, and many of his compelling phrases – among them “the affluent society,” “conventional wisdom” and “countervailing power” – became part of the language.
An imposing presence, lanky and angular at 6 feet 8 inches tall, Galbraith was consulted frequently by national leaders, and he gave advice freely, though it may have been ignored as often as it was taken. Galbraith clearly preferred taking issue with the conventional wisdom he distrusted.
He strived to change the very texture of the national conversation about power and its nature in the modern world by explaining how the planning of giant corporations superseded market mechanisms. His sweeping ideas – which might have gained even greater traction had he developed disciples willing and able to prove them with mathematical models – came to strike some as almost quaint in today’s harsh, interconnected world in which corporations devour one another for breakfast.
“The distinctiveness of his contribution appears to be slipping from view,” Stephen P. Dunn wrote in The Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics in 2002.
Galbraith, a revered lecturer for generations of Harvard students, nonetheless always commanded attention.
Robert Lekachman, a liberal economist who shared many of Galbraith’s views on an affluent society that both thought not generous enough to its poor nor sufficiently attendant to its public needs, once described the quality of his discourse as “witty, supple, eloquent and edged with that sheen of malice which the fallen sons of Adam always find attractive when it is directed at targets other than themselves.”
From the 1930s to the 1990s, Galbraith helped define the terms of the national political debate, influencing both the direction of the Democratic Party and the thinking of its leaders.
He tutored Adlai E. Stevenson, the Democratic nominee for president in 1952 and 1956, on Keynesian economics. He advised President John F. Kennedy (often over lobster stew at the Locke- Ober restaurant in their beloved Boston) and served as his ambassador to India.
Though he eventually broke with President Lyndon B. Johnson over the war in Vietnam, he helped conceive of Johnson’s Great Society program and wrote a major presidential address that outlined its purposes. In 1968, pursuing his opposition to the war, he helped Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy seek the Democratic nomination for president.
A popular lecturer, he treated economics as an aspect of society and culture rather than as an arcane discipline of numbers. But other economists, even many of his fellow liberals, did not generally share his views on production and consumption.
Such criticism did not sit well with Galbraith, a man no one ever called modest, and he would respond that his critics had rightly recognized that his ideas were “deeply subversive of the established orthodoxy.”