John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth "Ken" Galbraith, OC (properly /ɡælˈbreɪθ/ gal-BRAYTH, but commonly /ˈɡælbreɪθ/ GAL-brayth; 15 October 1908 – 29 April 2006), was a Canadian-American economist. He was a Keynesian, an institutionalist, and a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s and he filled the role of public intellectual from the 1950s to the 1970s on matters of economics.

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 Democratic Party politics, serving in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson; he served as United States Ambassador to India under Kennedy. Due to his prodigious literary output he was arguably the best known economist in the world during his lifetime and was one of a select few people to be awarded the Medal of Freedom, in 1946, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2000, for services to economics. The government of France made him a Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur.

Read more about John Kenneth Galbraith:  Postwar, Works, Honors

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    Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
    —John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)

    The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.
    John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)

    His pain was too great. He begged me for the simple mercy of death. And I could do nothing else but help him leave a world that had become a sleepless, tortured nightmare to him.
    Robert D. Andrews, and Nick Grindé. Dr. John Garth (Boris Karloff)

    We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you’re looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.
    —John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)

    Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.
    —John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)