Famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith dies

updated 5:10 p.m. ET April 30, 2006

BOSTON - John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard professor who won worldwide renown as a liberal economist, backstage politician and witty chronicler of affluent society, died Saturday night, his son said. He was 97.

Galbraith died of natural causes at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, where he was admitted nearly two weeks ago, Alan Galbraith said.

During a long career, the Canadian-born economist served as adviser to Democratic presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, and was John F. Kennedy’s ambassador to India.

“He had a wonderful and full life,” his son said.

Galbraith, who was outspoken in his support of government action to solve social problems, became a large figure on the American scene in the decades after World War II.

An unabashed liberal
He was one of America’s best-known liberals, and he never shied away from the label.

“There is no hope for liberals if they seek only to imitate conservatives, and no function either,” Galbraith wrote in a 1992 article in Modern Maturity, a publication of the American Association of Retired Persons.

One of his most influential books, “The Affluent Society,” was published in 1958.

It argued that the American economy was producing individual wealth but hasn’t adequately addressed public needs such as schools and highways. U.S. economists and politicians were still using the assumptions of the world of the past, where scarcity and poverty were near-universal, he said.

“The total alteration in underlying circumstances has not been squarely faced,” he wrote. “As a result, we are guided, in part, by ideas that are relevant to another world. ... We do many things that are unnecessary, some that are unwise, and a few that are insane.”

Prolific writer, theorist
In 1999, a panel of judges organized by the Modern Library, a book publisher, picked “The Affluent Society” as No. 46 on its list of the century’s 100 best English-language works of nonfiction.

“He’s an amazingly imaginative and creative and hardworking person,” fellow economist and longtime friend Paul Samuelson said in 1994. “There’s no day that goes by that he doesn’t write every morning, and it adds up to a lot.”

Galbraith also was known for his theories on countervailing forces in the economy, where groups such as labor unions were needed to strike a political and social balance.

Richard Neustadt, a Harvard colleague who also served as an aide to presidents Kennedy and Truman, said Galbraith demonstrated how “you have to empower people directly before they could fight for themselves.”

Galbraith, greeted by the Great Depression when he graduated from college, also had “much more confidence in the ability to work out of economic difficulties and do so with the help of government,” Neustadt said.

Galbraith’s prose won admiration at the very top. When he was ambassador to India, Kennedy enjoyed his writing so much that he insisted on seeing all Galbraith’s cables, “whether they were directed at the president or not,” Neustadt said.

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