John Kenneth Galbraith

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John Kenneth Galbraith bigraphy, stories - American diplomat

John Kenneth Galbraith : biography

October 15, 1908 – April 29, 2006

John Kenneth "Ken" Galbraith, OC (properly , but commonly ; 15 October 1908 – 29 April 2006) was a Canadian and later, U.S. economist, public official and diplomat, and a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s, during which time Galbraith fulfilled the role of public intellectual. In macro-economical terms he was a Keynesian and an institutionalist.Robert R. Keller. Keynesian and Institutional Economics: Compatibility and Complementarity? Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Dec., 1983), pp. 1087-1095.

Galbraith was a long-time Harward faculty member and as a professor of economics stayed with Harvard University for half a century. He was a prolific author and wrote four dozen books, including several novels, and published over a thousand articles and essays 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).

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 prodigious literary output and outspokenness made him arguably "the best-known economist in the world" during his lifetime. Galbraith was one of few recipients both of the Medal of Freedom (1946) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2000) for his public service and contribution to science. The government of France made him a Commandeur de la Légion d’honneur.

Life

Early life

Galbraith was born to Canadians of Scottish descent, Archibald "Archie" Galbraith and Sarah Catherine Kendall, in Iona Station, Ontario, Canada, and was raised in Dunwich Township, Ontario.Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Scotch. Toronto: Macmillan, 1964. 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, registering a height of 6 feet 8 inches (203 cm).

His father was a farmer and school teacher; his mother, a homemaker and a community activist, died when he was 14 years old. The family farm was located on Thomson Line. Both 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 Willy’s Side Road. Later, he went to Dutton High School and St. Thomas High School. Galbraith graduated in 1931 from the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph, which was an associate agricultural college of the University of Toronto at the time, with a B.Sc in agricultural economics majoring in animal husbandry. He was awarded a Giannini Scholarship in Agricultural Economics ($60 per month) that allowed him to travel to Berkeley, California where he received a M.Sc. and Ph.D. in agricultural economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

After graduating 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 United States citizen and was no longer a British subject.Note: Canada did not have its own citizenship at the time, but later the United States and Canada acknowledged that their citizens, who had taken out citizenship in the others’ countries, were recognized as having also retained their original citizenship, and Galbraith died as he had been born – a Canadian, though he had previously already been amply honored as a Canadian as well as American. In the same year, he took a year-long fellowship at the University of Cambridge, England, where he was influenced by John Maynard Keynes, then traveled in Europe for several months in 1938, attending an international economic conference and developing his ideas.Galbraith, John Kenneth. A Life in Our Times: Memoirs. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981, ch. 6. His public service started in the era of New Deal when he joined the United States Department of Agriculture. From 1943 until 1948, he served as an editor of Fortune magazine. In 1949, he was appointed professor of economics at Harvard.