April 30, 2006
John Kenneth Galbraith, 97, Dies; Economist Held a Mirror to Society
By HOLCOMB B. NOBLE and DOUGLAS MARTIN
John Kenneth Galbraith, the iconoclastic economist, teacher and
diplomat and an unapologetically liberal member of the political
and academic establishment that he needled in prolific writings
for more than half a century, died yesterday at a hospital in
Cambridge, Mass. He was 97.
Mr. Galbraith lived in Cambridge and at an "unfarmed farm" near
Newfane, Vt. His death was confirmed by his son J. Alan
Galbraith.
Mr. Galbraith was one of the most widely read authors in the
history of economics; among his 33 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,
Mr. Galbraith was consulted frequently by national leaders, and
he gave advice freely, though it may have been ignored as often
as it was taken. Mr. 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explaining how the planning of giant corporations superseded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 where
corporations devour one another.
"The distinctiveness of his contribution appears to be slipping
from view," Stephen P. Dunn wrote in The Journal of Post-
Keynesian Economics in 2002.
Mr. Galbraith, a revered lecturer for generations of Harvard
students, nonetheless always commanded attention.
Robert Lekachman, a liberal economist who shared many of Mr.
Galbraith's views on an affluent society that they both thought
not generous enough to its poor or 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 1930's to the 1990's, Mr. Galbraith helped define the
terms of the national political debate, influencing 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 Mr. 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 Senator Eugene J. McCarthy seek the Democratic
nomination for president.
In the course of his long 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.
He drew on his experiences in government to write three satirical
novels. One in 1968, "The Triumph," a best seller, was an assault
on the State Department's slapstick attempts to assist a mythical
banana republic, Puerto Santos. In 1990, he took on the Harvard
economics department with "A Tenured Professor," ridiculing,
among others, a certain outspoken character who bore no small
resemblance to himself.
At his death Mr. Galbraith was the Paul M. Warburg emeritus
professor of economics at Harvard, where he had taught for most
of his career. A popular lecturer, he treated economics as an
aspect of society and culture rather than as an arcane discipline
of numbers.
Keeping It Simple
Mr. Galbraith was admired, envied and sometimes scorned for his
eloquence and wit and his ability to make complicated, dry issues
understandable to any educated reader. He enjoyed his
international reputation as a slayer of sacred cows and a
maverick among economists whose pronouncements became known as
"classic Galbraithian heresies."
But other economists, even many of his fellow liberals, did not
generally share his views on production and consumption, and he
was not regarded by his peers as among the top-ranked theorists
and scholars. Such criticism did not sit well with Mr. 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."
"As a matter of vested interest, if not of truth," he added,
"they were compelled to resist." He once said, "Economists are
economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of
their graduate days last a lifetime."
Nearly 40 years after writing "The Affluent Society," Mr.
Galbraith updated it in 1996 as "The Good Society." In it, he
said that his earlier concerns had only worsened: that if
anything, America had become even more a "democracy of the
fortunate," with the poor increasingly excluded from a fair place
at the table.
Mr. Galbraith gave broad thought to how America changed from a
nation of small farms and workshops to one of big factories and
superstores, and judgments of this legacy are as broad as his
ambition. Beginning with "American Capitalism" in 1952, he laid
out a detailed critique of an increasingly oligopolistic economy.
Combined with works in the 1950's by writers like David Reisman,
Vance Packard and William H. Whyte, the book changed people's
views of the postwar world.
Mr. Galbraith argued that technology mandated long-term contracts
to diminish high-stakes uncertainty. He said companies used
advertising to induce consumers to buy things they had never
dreamed they needed.
Other economists, like Gary S. Becker and George J. Stigler, both
Nobel Prize winners, countered with proofs showing that
advertising is essentially informative rather than manipulative.
Many viewed Mr. Galbraith as the leading scion of the American
institutionalist school of economics, commonly associated with
Thorstein Veblen and his idea of "conspicuous consumption." This
school deplored the universal pretensions of economic theory, and
stressed the importance of historical and social factors in
shaping "economic laws."
Some, therefore, said Mr. Galbraith might best be called an
"economic sociologist." This view was reinforced by Mr.
Galbraith's nontechnical phrasing, called glibness by the envious
and antagonistic.
Mr. Galbraith's pride in following in the tradition of Veblen was
challenged by the emergence of what came to be called the new
institutionalist school. This approach, associated with the
University of Chicago, claimed to prove that economics determines
historical and political change, not vice versa.
Some suggested that Mr. Galbraith's liberalism crippled his
influence. In a review of "John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His
Politics, His Economics" by Richard Parker (Farrar, 2005), J.
Bradford DeLong wrote in Foreign Affairs that Mr. Galbraith's
lifelong sermon of social democracy was destined to fail in a
land of "rugged individualism." He compared Mr. Galbraith to
Sisyphus, endlessly pushing the same rock up a hill that always
turns out to be too steep.
Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, maintains that Mr.
Galbraith not only reached but also defined the summit of his
field. In the 2000 commencement address at Harvard, Mr. Parker's
book recounts, Mr. 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.
John Kenneth Galbraith was born Oct. 15, 1908, on a 150-acre farm
in Dunwich Township in southern Ontario, Canada, the only son of
William Archibald and Catherine Kendall Galbraith. His forebears
had left Scotland years before.
His father was a farmer and schoolteacher, the head of a farm-
cooperative insurance company, an organizer of the township
telephone company, and a town and county auditor. His mother,
whom he described as beautiful but decidedly firm, died when he
was 14.
The Farming Life
Mr. Galbraith said in his memoir "A Life in Our Times" (1981)
that no one could understand farming without knowing two things
about it: a farmer's sense of inferiority and his appreciation of
manual labor. His own sense of inferiority, he said, was coupled
with his belief that the Galbraith clan was more intelligent,
knowledgeable and affluent than its neighbors.
"My legacy was the inherent insecurity of the farm-reared boy in
combination with the aggressive feeling that I owed to all I
encountered to make them better informed," he said.
Mr. 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," Mr. Galbraith related. "The effect on this
agrarian audience was electric. Afterward I congratulated him on
the brilliance of the sally. He said, 'It was good but it didn't
change any votes.' "
At age 18 he enrolled at Ontario Agricultural College, where he
took practical farming courses like poultry husbandry and basic
plumbing. But as the Depression dragged down Canadian farmers,
the questions of the way farm products were sold and at what
prices became more urgent to him than how they were produced. 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.
A major influence on him was the caustic social commentary he
found in Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class." Mr. 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," Mr. 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."
While at Berkeley, he began contributing to The Journal of Farm
Economics and other publications. His writings came to the
attention of Harvard, where he became an instructor and tutor
from 1934 to 1939. In those years the theories of John Maynard
Keynes were exciting economists everywhere because they promised
solutions to the most urgent problems of the time: the Depression
and unemployment. The government must intervene in moments of
crisis, Lord Keynes maintained, and unbalance the budget if
necessary to prime the pump and get the nation's economic
machinery running again.
Keynesianism gave economic validation to what President Roosevelt
was doing, Mr. Galbraith thought, and he resolved in 1937 "to go
to the temple" -- Cambridge University -- on a fellowship grant
for a year of study with the disciples of Lord Keynes.
In 1937 Mr. Galbraith married Catherine Merriam Atwater, the
daughter of a prominent New York lawyer and a linguist, whom he
met when she was a graduate student at Radcliffe.
In addition to his wife and his son J. Alan, of Washington, a
lawyer, he is survived by two other sons, Peter, a former United
States ambassador to Croatia and a senior fellow at the Center
for Arms Control and Nonproliferation in Washington, and James,
an economist at the University of Texas; a sister, Catherine
Denholm of Toronto; and six grandchildren.
Mr. Galbraith became an American citizen, and taught economics at
Princeton in 1939. But after the fall of France in 1940, Mr.
Galbraith joined the Roosevelt administration to help manage an
economy being prepared for war. He rose to become the
administrator of wage and price controls in the Office of Price
Administration. Prices remained stable, but he grew
controversial, drawing the constant fire of industry complaints.
"I reached the point that all price fixers reach," he said, "My
enemies outnumbered my friends."
He was forced to resign in 1943 and was rejected by the Army as
too tall when he sought to enlist. He then held a variety of
government and private jobs, including director of the United
States Strategic Bombing Survey in 1945, director of the Office
of Economic Security Policy in the State Department in 1946, and
a member of the board of editors of Fortune magazine from 1943 to
1948. It was at Fortune, he said, that he became addicted to
writing.
In 1949 he returned to Harvard as a professor of economics; his
lectures were delivered before standing-room-only audiences. And
he began to write with intensity, rising early and writing at
least two or three hours a day, before his normally full schedule
of other duties began, for most of the rest of his life.
He 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
described the pressures that corporations and unions exerted on
each other for increased profits and increased wages, and said
these countervailing forces kept those giant groups in
equilibrium and the nation's economy prosperous and stable.
In his 1981 memoir, he said that though the basic idea was still
sound, he had been "a bit carried away" by his notion of
countervailing power. "I made it far more inevitable and rather
more equalizing than, in practice, it ever is," he wrote, adding
that often it does not emerge, with the result that "numerous
groups -- the ghetto young, the rural poor, textile workers, many
consumers -- remain weak or helpless."
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. He said: "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. I set out to involve a larger community."
He wrote two more major books in the 50's dealing with economics,
but both were aimed at a large general audience. Both were best
sellers.
In "The Great Crash 1929," he rattled the complacent, recalled
the mistakes of an earlier day and suggested that some were being
repeated as the book appeared, in 1955. Mr. 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.
"The Affluent Society" appeared in 1958, making Mr. Galbraith
known around the world. In it, he depicted a consumer culture
gone wild, rich in goods but poor in the social services that
make for community. He argued that America had become so obsessed
with overproducing consumer goods that it had increased the
perils of both inflation and recession by creating an artificial
demand for frivolous or useless products, by encouraging
overextension of consumer credit and by emphasizing the private
sector at the expense of the public sector. He declared that this
obsession with products like the biggest and fastest automobile
damaged the quality of life in America by creating "private
opulence and public squalor."
Anticipating the environmental movement by nearly a decade, he
asked, "Is the added production or the added efficiency in
production worth its effect on ambient air, water and space -- the
countryside?" Mr. Galbraith called for a change in values that
would shun the seductions of advertising and champion clean air,
good housing and aid for the arts.
Later, in "The New Industrial State" (1967), he tried to trace
the shift of power from the landed aristocracy through the great
industrialists to the technical and managerial experts of modern
corporations. He called for a new class of intellectuals and
professionals to determine policy. While critics, as usual,
praised his ability to write compellingly, they also continued to
complain that he oversimplified economic matters and either
ignored or failed to keep up with corporate changes. Mr.
Galbraith conceded some errors and revised his book in 1971.
A Move Into Politics
One of his early readers was Adlai Stevenson, the governor of
Illinois, who twice ran unsuccessfully for president against
Dwight D. Eisenhower. Mr. Galbraith often wrote to Mr.
Stevenson, introducing him to Keynesian taxation and unemployment
policies. In 1953, Mr. Galbraith and Thomas K. Finletter, the
former secretary of the Air Force and later ambassador to NATO,
formed a sort of brain trust for Mr. Stevenson that included
Ambassador W. Averell Harriman, the historian Arthur M.
Schlesinger Jr. and the foreign policy specialist George W. Ball.
Although Mr. Galbraith did not at first regard Kennedy, a former
student of his at Harvard, as a serious member of Congress, he
began to change his view after Kennedy was elected to the Senate
in 1952 and began calling him for advice. The senator's
conversations became increasingly wide-ranging and well informed,
Mr. Galbraith said, and his respect and affection grew.
After Mr. Kennedy won the presidency in 1960, he appointed Mr.
Galbraith the United States ambassador to India. There were
those, Mr. Galbraith among them, who believed that 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." Mr. Galbraith was fascinated with India; he had
spent a year there 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 Indian government.
When India became embroiled in a border war with China in the
Himalayas in 1962, Ambassador Galbraith effectively took charge
of both the American military and the diplomatic response during
what was a brief but potentially explosive crisis. He saw to it
that India received restrained American help and took it upon
himself to announce that the United States 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.
Mr. 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.
In 1963, Mr. Galbraith added fiction to his repertory for the
first time with "The McLandress Dimension," a novel he wrote
under the pseudonym Mark Epernay.
After Kennedy was assassinated, Mr. Galbraith served as an
adviser to President Johnson, meeting with him often at the White
House or on trips to the president's ranch in Texas to talk about
what could be accomplished with the Great Society programs. Mr.
Galbraith said that Johnson had summoned him to write the final
draft of his speech outlining the purposes of the Great Society,
and that when the writing was done, said: "I'm not going to
change a word. That's great."
The relationship between the two men soon broke apart over their
differences over the war in Vietnam. Nevertheless, when Adlai
Stevenson died in 1965, the ambassadorship to the United Nations
became vacant, and word reached Mr. Galbraith that the president
was considering him as Mr. Stevenson's successor.
A Job Declined
Not wanting to be placed in the position of having to defend
administration positions he strongly opposed, Mr. Galbraith
suggested Justice Arthur J. Goldberg of the Supreme Court. The
president named Mr. Goldberg, and Mr. Galbraith later blamed
himself for a "poisonous" mistake that "cost the court a good and
liberal jurist." Others said he took too much credit for what
happened.
In 1973 he published "Economics and the Public Purpose," in which
he sought to extend the planning system already used by the
industrial core of the economy to the market economy, to small-
business owners and to entrepreneurs. Mr. Galbraith called for a
"new socialism," with more steeply progressive taxes; public
support of the arts; public ownership of housing, medical and
transportation facilities; and the conversion of some
corporations and military contractors into public corporations.
He continued to rise early and, despite the seeming
effortlessness of his prose, revised each day's work at least
five times. "It was usually on about the fourth day that I put in
that note of spontaneity for which I am known," he said.
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. He continued to pour out
magazine articles, book reviews, op-ed essays, letters to
editors; he lectured everywhere, sometimes debating William F.
Buckley Jr., his friend and Gstaad skiing partner. He was so
prolific that Art Buchwald, the humorist, once introduced him by
citing his literary production: "Since 1959 alone, he has written
12 books, 135 articles, 61 book reviews, 16 book introductions,
312 book blurbs and 105,876 letters to The New York Times, of
which all but 3 have been printed."
In 1977 he wrote and narrated "The Age of Uncertainty," a 13-part
television series surveying 200 years of economic theory and
practice. In 1990 he wrote "A Tenured Professor," about a Harvard
professor who devised a legal, foolproof and computer-assisted
system for playing the stock market and used his billions of
dollars in profits on programs for education and peace -- only to
be investigated by Congress for un-American activities and forced
to shut down his operations.
In 1996, as Mr. Galbraith approached his 90th year, he wrote "The
Good Society." Matthew Miller wrote in The New York Times Book
Review, "We're not likely to find as elegant a little restatement
of the liberal creed, or its call to conscience."
Mr. Galbraith said Republicans out to roll back the welfare state
made a fundamental error in thinking that politicians and their
actions drive history. In fact, he argued, it is the reverse.
Liberals did not create big government; history did.
Mr. Galbraith, who received the Medal of Freedom from President
Bill Clinton in 2000, continued to make his views known. Some
were surprising, like his speech in 1999 praising Johnson's
presidency, which he had helped to bring down by working with
McCarthy.
There always seemed to be one more book. One, "The Essential
Galbraith" (2001), was a collection of essays and excerpts that a
reviewer in Business Week said remained very timely. Another,
"Name-Dropping from F.D.R. On" (1999), recounted encounters with
the powerful, including President Kennedy's response when Mr.
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, Mr. Galbraith, who was then 95, published "The Economics
of Innocent Fraud," a short book that questioned much of the
standard economic wisdom by questioning the ability of markets to
regulate themselves, the usefulness of monetary policy and the
effectiveness of corporate governance.
He remained optimistic about the ability of government to improve
the lot of the less fortunate. "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."
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