John Kenneth Galbraith Popular Books

John Kenneth Galbraith Biography & Facts

John Kenneth Galbraith (October 15, 1908 – April 29, 2006), also known as Ken Galbraith, was a Canadian-American economist, diplomat, public official, and intellectual. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s. As an economist, he leaned toward post-Keynesian economics from an institutionalist perspective. Galbraith was a long-time Harvard faculty member and stayed with Harvard University for half a century as a professor of economics. He was a prolific author and wrote four dozen books, including several novels, and published more than a thousand articles and essays on various subjects. Among his works was a trilogy on economics, American Capitalism (1952), The Affluent Society (1958), and The New Industrial State (1967). Some of his work has been criticized by economists Milton Friedman, Paul Krugman, Robert Solow, and Thomas Sowell. 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 the Kennedy administration. His political activism, literary output and outspokenness brought him wide fame during his lifetime. Galbraith was one of the few to receive both the World War II Medal of Freedom (1946) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2000) for his public service and contributions to science. Life Early life Galbraith was born on October 15, 1908, to Canadians of Scottish descent, Sarah Catherine (Kendall) and Archibald "Archie" Galbraith, in Iona Station, Ontario, Canada, and was raised in Dunwich Township, Ontario. He had three siblings: Alice, Catherine, and Archibald William (Bill). By the time he was a teenager, he had adopted the name Ken, and later disliked being called John. Galbraith grew to be a very tall man, attaining a height of 6 feet 9 inches (206 cm). His father was a farmer, school teacher, president of a cooperative insurance company, and local official of the Liberal Party. His mother, a homemaker and a community activist, died when he was fourteen years old. The family farm was located on Thomson Line. Both of his parents were supporters of the United Farmers of Ontario in the 1920s. His early years were spent at a one-room school which is still standing, on 9468 Willey Road, in Iona Station. Later, he went to Dutton High School and St. Thomas High School. In 1931, Galbraith graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture from the Ontario Agricultural College, which was then an associate agricultural college of the University of Toronto. He majored in animal husbandry. He was awarded a Giannini Scholarship in Agricultural Economics (receiving $60 per month) that allowed him to travel to Berkeley, California, where he received masters and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in agricultural economics from the University of California, Berkeley. Galbraith was taught economics by Professor George Martin Peterson, and together they wrote an economics paper titled "The Concept of Marginal Land" in 1932 that was published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. After graduation in 1934, he started to work as an instructor at Harvard University. Galbraith taught intermittently at Harvard in the period 1934 to 1939. From 1939 to 1940, he taught at Princeton University. In 1937, he became a citizen of the United States and was no longer a British subject. In the same year, he took a year-long fellowship at the University of Cambridge, England, where he was influenced by John Maynard Keynes. He then traveled in Europe for several months in 1938, attending an international economic conference and developing his ideas. He served for a few months in summer 1934 in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As a Harvard teacher in 1938 he was given charge of a research project for the National Resources Planning Board. From 1943 until 1948, he served as an editor of Fortune magazine. In 1949, he was appointed professor of economics at Harvard. He also taught at the Harvard Extension School. World War II The United States went into WWII with an economy still not fully recovered from the Great Depression. Because wartime production needs mandated large budget deficits and an accommodating monetary policy, inflation and a runaway wage-price spiral were seen as likely. As a part of a team charged with keeping inflation from damaging the war effort, Galbraith served as a deputy administrator of the Office of Price Administration (OPA) during World War II in 1941–1943. The OPA directed the process of stabilization of prices and rents. On May 11, 1941, President Roosevelt created the Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply (OPACS). On August 28, 1941, it became the Office of Price Administration (OPA). After the US entered the war in December 1941, OPA was tasked with rationing and price controls. The Emergency Price Control Act passed on January 30, 1942, legitimized the OPA as a separate federal agency. It merged OPA with two other agencies: Consumer Protection Division and Price Stabilization Division of the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense. The council was referred to as the National Defense Advisory Commission (NDAC), and was created on May 29, 1940. NDAC emphasized voluntary and advisory methods in keeping prices low. Leon Henderson, the NDAC commissioner for price stabilization, became the administrator of OPACS and of OPA in 1941–1942. He oversaw a mandatory and vigorous price regulation that started in May 1942 after OPA introduced the General Maximum Price Regulation (GMPR). It was much criticized by the business community. In response, OPA mobilized the public on behalf of the new guidelines and said that it reduced the options for those who were seeking higher rents or prices. OPA had its own Enforcement Division, which documented the increase of violations: a quarter million in 1943 and more than 300,000 during the next year. Historians and economists differ over the assessment of the OPA activities, which started with six people, but then grew to 15,000 staffers. Some of them point to the fact that price increases were relatively lower than during the First World War, and that the overall economy grew faster. Steven Pressman, for example, wrote that "when the controls were removed there was only a small increase in prices, thereby demonstrating that inflationary pressures were actively managed and not just kept temporarily under control." Galbraith said in an interview that he considered his work at the OPA as his major life achievement, since prices were relatively stable during WWII. The role of the OPA, however, as well as the whole legacy of the US government wartime economic stabilization measures from a long-term perspective, remains debated. Richard Parker, who earlier had written a well regarded biography of Galbraith had this to say about Galbraith's efforts during the war: [H]e had first gone to w.... Discover the John Kenneth Galbraith popular books. Find the top 100 most popular John Kenneth Galbraith books.