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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“Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“Dead of a dark thing, John Holmes, you’ve been lost
in the college chapel, mourned as father and teacher,
mourned with piety and grace under the University Cross.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“More than a thousand years it is since she
Was beautiful: she trod the living grass;
She saw the clouds.”
—James Kenneth Stephens (1882–1950)
“Increasingly in recent times we have come first to identify the remedy that is most agreeable, most convenient, most in accord with major pecuniary or political interest, the one that reflects our available faculty for action; then we move from the remedy so available or desired back to a cause to which that remedy is relevant.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)