© 2006 Associated Press
Famed economist
John Kenneth Galbraith
dies at 97
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 29 — 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.
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.''
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.
After his retirement from Harvard in 1975, Galbraith
gained fresh recognition as host of the British-made
television series, ''The Age of Uncertainty.'' His book
under the same title was a best seller, as was ''Almost
Everyone's Guide to Economics.''
Among his other books were ''The Great Crash,'' 1955,
and ''The Culture of Contentment,'' 1992. He returned to
the theme of the crash of 1929 in a January 1987 Atlantic
Monthly article that correctly predicted that year's
market plunge by citing the parallels of the two eras.
In 1988, he and Soviet economist Stanislav Menshikov
wrote ''Capitalism, Communism and Coexistence: From the
Bitter Past to a Better Prospect.'' The book is a
compilation of discussions conducted at Galbraith's
summer home in Townsend, Vt., about socialism and
capitalism. His 1996 book, ''The Good Society,'' outlined
his blueprint for enriching America economically and
socially, while his 1999 book, ''Name-Dropping: From FDR
On,'' was a lighthearted look at his encounters with
everyone from Eleanor Roosevelt onward.
''It is not usual for a man past his 90th birthday to
write a book that is as fresh and lively as the work of a
30-year-old. But John Kenneth Galbraith is not a usual
man, and he has done it,'' The New York Times wrote about
''Name-Dropping.''
Globe-trotting was a favorite activity of Galbraith,
who spent time touring India during his tenure as
ambassador. He wrote a factual account of his India years
as well as a novel, ''The Triumph,'' concerning what he
called ''an uncontrollably funny institution,'' the U.S.
State Department.
From Cambridge to Tokyo, the 6-foot, 7-inch Galbraith was
an avid reciter of dry limericks and pungent, outrageous
humor, often at the expense of American society.
Noting that by the law of aerodynamics, the bumblebee
in principle cannot fly, Galbraith once remarked, ''If
all this be true, life among bumblebees must bear a
remarkable resemblance to life in the United States.''
He was an ardent worker, often hibernating for several
months at his summer home in the Vermont mountains to do
nothing but write. His secretary in his Harvard office
would warn those trying to contact him — ''on
penalty of death'' — to call him only between noon
and 1 p.m., when he took his lunch break.
Galbraith was born Oct. 15, 1908, in Iona Station,
Ontario, Canada.
After graduating from the University of Toronto in
1931, Galbraith moved to the United States where he
earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of
California. He taught at Harvard from 1934 to 1939 and at
Princeton University from 1939 to 1942, then worked in
the federal Office of Price Administration during the war
years.
Galbraith returned to Harvard in 1948, remaining
active on the faculty until his retirement.
He was the recipient of the Medal of Freedom, awarded
by Truman in 1946, and another one from President Clinton
in 2000. The professor also served as president for a
term of the American Economic Association.
Galbraith was married in 1937 to Catherine Atwater.
They had three sons, Alan, Peter and James.
© 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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The New York Times
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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2006 The New York
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