John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith (Ontario, Canada, October 15, 1908 - Cambridge, United States, April 29, 2006) was a Canadian economist.

Biography

Childhood and training

Galbraith was born to Canadians of Scottish descent Sarah Catherine Kendall and Archibald "Archie" Galbraith, in Iona Station, Ontario, Canada, and grew up in Dunwich Township, Western Ontario. She had three siblings: Alice, Catherine, and Archibald William (Bill). When he was a teenager, he had adopted the name "Ken", and later disliked being called John. Galbraith grew very tall, reaching a height of 6 ft 9 in (206 cm).

His father was a farmer and a schoolteacher. His mother, a homemaker and community activist, died when she was fourteen years old. The family farm dedicated to selected livestock, was located in Thomson Line and had two pieces of land with a total area of about 60 hectares. The Galbraiths were the most influential and wealthy family in their community. His parents were supporters of the United Farmers of Ontario in the 1920s. He continued his primary education in a one-room school that still exists, on Willy's Side Road. 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, in Guelph, Ontario, which was then an associate agricultural college of the University of Toronto. He specialized in livestock. He spent 5 years at this center, creating and directing the institution's newspaper. In 1931 he was awarded a Giannini Fellowship in Agricultural Economics (receiving $60 a month) which enabled him to travel to the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a Master of Science and a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the University of California at Berkeley. Galbraith learned economics from Professor George Martin Peterson, and together they wrote an economics paper entitled "The Concept of Marginal Land" in 1932 it was published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. In those central years of the Great Depression, the Giannini Foundation, established shortly before by the founder of Bank of America, promoted a broad collaboration between the University and the powerful Californian agricultural sector greatly affected by the crisis at its headquarters at the University of Berkeley. The collaboration allowed farmers to have a price forecast and a correct crop strategy as well as adapt direct and processed productions to the taste of consumers. In all these facets, Galbraith's initiative and innovative economic ideas began to shine, and he immediately ranked far above the economic knowledge of the center. His multiple publications led to Harvard University nominating him as a professor in 1934. After graduating in 1934, he began working as a professor at Harvard University. Galbraith taught intermittently at Harvard from 1934 to 1939. From 1939 to 1940, he taught at Princeton University, where he failed to integrate due to the classism then existing at that university, which severely sifted students at the end of the first year. year, based mainly on their social belonging.

In 1937, he became a United States citizen although he was no longer a Canadian citizen. That same year, he took a one-year scholarship at the University of Cambridge, England, where he was influenced by John Maynard Keynes and met other great economists such as Schumpeter, Piero Sraffa, Michal Kalecki, and Joan Robinson. He then traveled Europe for several months in 1938, attending an international economic conference and developing his ideas. His public service began in the New Deal era when he joined the United States Department of Agriculture.

World War II

“I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I am in favor. Where the Government is necessary, I am in favor. I am deeply suspicious of someone who says: "I am in favor of privatization," or "I am deeply in favor of public ownership." I am in favor of what works in each particular case. - C-SPAN, November 13, 1994.

The United States entered World War II with an economy that had not yet fully recovered from the Great Depression. Because wartime production necessitates a mandatory budget deficit and accommodative monetary policy, inflation and a spiral of runaway wages and prices were considered possible. As part of a team tasked with preventing inflation from crippling the war effort, Galbraith served as deputy director of the Office of Price Administration (O.P.A.) during World War II from 1941-1943. The O.P.A. he directed the process of stabilization of prices and rents.

On May 11, 1941, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8734 creating the Office of Civilian Supply and Price Administration (OPACS). On August 28, 1941, an Executive Order 8875 transformed the OPACS into the Office of Price Administration (O.P.A.). After the United States entered World War II in December 1941, the O.P.A. he was in charge of rationing tasks. The Emergency Price Control Act, passed on January 30, 1942, legitimized the O.P.A. as an independent federal agency. Merged into the O.P.A. with two other agencies: the Consumer Protection Division and the Price Stabilization Division of the National Defense Council Advisory Commission. The council was known as the National Defense Advisory Commission (NDAC), and was created on May 1940. NDAC emphasized voluntary and advisory methods to keep prices down. Leon Henderson, NDAC commissioner for price stabilization, became head of OPACS and O.P.A. In 1941-1942. he oversaw vigorous mandatory price regulation that began in May 1942 after the O.P.A. introduced the General Regulation of Maximum Prices (GMPR). He was heavily criticized by the American business community. In response the O.P.A. mobilized the public on behalf of the new guidelines and explained that it narrowed the options for those seeking higher rents or prices. The O.P.A. it had its own Enforcement Division, which documented the rising tide of violations: a quarter of a million in 1943 and more than 300,000 over the next year.

Historians and economists differ on the assessment of the O.P.A., which started with six people but later grew to 15,000 employees. Some point to the fact that price increases were relatively lower than during World War I World and that the global economy grew faster. Steven Pressman, for example, wrote that "when controls were removed, there was only a small increase in prices, thus demonstrating that inflationary pressures were being actively managed and not just temporarily kept in check." Galbraith said in an interview that he considered his work on the takeover bid his greatest achievement in life, since prices were relatively stable during World War II. However, the role of the O.P.A., as well as the entire legacy of the US government's wartime economic stabilization measures from a long-term perspective, remains a matter of debate. Richard Parker, who had previously written a well-regarded biography of Galbraith, had this to say about Galbraith's efforts during the war:

He had gone to work in the nation's capital in 1934 as a 25-year-old boy, just out of graduate school and almost finished joining Harvard faculty as a young instructor. He had returned to Washington in mid 1940, after Paris fell before the Germans, initially to help prepare the nation for war. Eighteen months later, after Pearl Harbor, he was appointed to oversee the war economy as a "price chief," in charge of preventing inflation and price corruption from ruining the economy while expanding to produce the weapons and materials necessary to guarantee victory against fascism. In this, he and his colleagues at the Price Management Office had been a remarkable success, guiding an economy that quadrupled their size in less than five years without reviving the inflation that had obsessed in the First World War, or leaving a disbalanced collapse after the war of the kind that had caused so much damage to Europe in the 1920s."

Postwar

Since 1943 when he was removed from the O.P.A. Due to business pressures, he was editor of Fortune magazine until 1948. This magazine of the Time / Life group was the most prestigious North American economic publication in business media. He was noted for color photographs by Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White, as well as a team of writers including James Agee, Archibald MacLeish and Alfred Kazin, hired specifically for his writing skills. Fortune became a major pillar of the Time/Life empire, owned by Henry Luce, which grew to become Time Warner. Fortune was published monthly. His work as a copywriter allowed Galbraith to gain in-depth firsthand knowledge of the organization and operation of the great American corporations. He also learned how to refine his writing style to make it accessible to the business reader of the magazine.

In 1945 he participated in a team of high-level analysts who investigated on the ground the effects of the bombings on the German economy, even questioning the minister responsible for armaments of Nazi Germany, Albert Speer. The conclusions formulated by Galbraith were that the bombings were not decisive in the outcome of the conflict since German military production grew throughout the war, reaching its maximum in 1944 and that the bombings of cities were counterproductive by freeing up manpower for the arms factories. These conclusions were not welcomed by the American Air Force, which went ahead with its plans to bomb Japan until the tragic end of the war.

In February 1946, Galbraith rose to a senior position in the State Department as director of the Office of Economic Security Policy, where he was nominally in charge of economic affairs with Germany, Japan, Austria, and South Korea.. Senior diplomats had no confidence in him, so he was relegated to routine work with few opportunities to do politics. Galbraith favored détente with the Soviet Union, along with Secretary of State James F. Byrnes and General Lucius D. Clay, the military governor of the United States Zone in Germany from 1947 to 1949, but they were out with the Policy. of containment that was then being developed by George Kennan and favored by most major American politicians. After a bewildering semester, Galbraith resigned in September 1946 and returned to his magazine writing on economic issues. Later, he immortalized his frustration with & # 34; the ways of Foggy Bottom & # 34; in a satirical novel, The Triumph (1968). The postwar period was also memorable for Galbraith because of his work, along with Eleanor Roosevelt and Hubert Humphrey, to establish a progressive political organization of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) in support of the cause of economic and social justice. in 1947.

In 1949, he was appointed tenured professor of economics at Harvard, where he also took charge of the university's economics press, due to his editorial experience at Fortune.

He was active in the 1952 and 1956 campaigns of Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. Stevenson's defeat in the first election plunged him into depression, and he had to submit to the care of a psychiatrist colleague of his at Harvard.

Political posts under Kennedy

During his time as an adviser to President John F. Kennedy, Galbraith was appointed United States Ambassador to India from 1961 to 1963. His relationship with President Kennedy was such that he regularly bypassed the State Department and sent his diplomatic cables directly to the president. In India, he became a confidant of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and extensively advised the Indian government on economic matters, as well as in the 1962 border conflict with China in which he advised accepting the ceasefire Fire proposed by China.

While serving in India, he helped establish one of the first computer science departments, at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh. Even after leaving office, Galbraith remained a friend and supporter of India. Due to his recommendation, the first lady of the United States Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy undertook her diplomatic missions in India and Pakistan in 1962.

In 1966, when he was no longer ambassador, he declared to the United States Senate that one of the main causes of the 1965 Kashmir War was US military aid to Pakistan.

After Kennedy's death, and despite his friendship with the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, he distanced himself from the Democratic administration because of his opposition to the American presence in Vietnam. Due to his discrepancies with the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, he did not accept the post of ambassador to the United Nations, which Johnson offered him after Stevenson's death and he became one of the leaders of the university and Democratic Party opposition to the Vietnam War.

Family

On September 17, 1937, Galbraith married Catherine Merriam Atwater, whom he met while a graduate student at Radcliffe. Their marriage lasted 68 years. The Galbraiths resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and had a summer home in Newfane, Vermont. They had four children: J. Alan Galbraith who is a partner in the law firm of Williams & Connolly of Washington, DC; Douglas Galbraith who died in infancy of leukemia; Peter W. Galbraith who has been a US diplomat who served as ambassador to Croatia and is a commentator on US foreign policy, particularly the Balkans and the Middle East and James K. Galbraith who is a progressive economist at the University of Texas at the School of Austin Public Affairs, Lyndon B. Johnson. The Galbraiths also had ten grandchildren.

Final years and recognition

In the fall of 1972, Galbraith was an adviser and aide to Nixon's rival candidate, George McGovern, in the US presidential election campaign. During this time (September 1972) he traveled in his role as president of the American Economic Association (AEA) at the invitation of the Chinese government to China with the economists Leontief and Tobin and in 1973 published an account of his experiences in the book A China Passage. In this paper he describes Mao Zedong's communist regime in China at the time from the perspective of the American liberal left.

In 1972 he served as president of the American Economic Association. The Journal of Post Keynesian Economics benefited from Galbraith's support and served as chairman of its board of directors from its inception.

During the filming of The World at War, a British television documentary series (1973-74), Galbraith described his experiences in Roosevelt's war administration. Galbraith also spoke about rationing and especially about fuel allocation deception.

In December 1977, he met Palauan Senator Roman Tmetuchl and eventually became an unpaid advisor to the Palau Political Status Commission. He advocated for a minimum of financial requirements and infrastructure projects. In 1979 he addressed the Palau legislature and participated in a seminar for delegates to the Palau Constitutional Convention. He became the first person to obtain an honorary citizenship of Palau.

In 1985, the American Humanist Association named him the Humanist of the Year. The Association for Asian Studies (AAS) presented him with its 1987 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies.

In 1997 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and in 2000 he was awarded the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom. He also received an honorary doctorate from Memorial University of Newfoundland in the fall 1999 convocation, another contribution to Galbraith's impressive collection of approximately fifty honorary degrees. In 2000, he was awarded the Leontief Prize for his outstanding contribution to economic theory by the Institute for Global Development and the Environment. The library in his hometown of Dutton, Ontario was renamed the John Kenneth Galbraith Library in honor of his attachment to the library and his contributions to the new building.

On April 29, 2006, Galbraith died in Cambridge, Massachusetts of natural causes at the age of 97, after a two-week stay in a hospital.

Writings

Even before becoming president of the American Economic Association, Galbraith was considered an iconoclast by many economists, due in part to his view of technical analysis and mathematical modeling in neoclassical economics as divorced from reality. As a follower of Thorstein Veblen, he believed that economic activity could not be distilled into inviolable laws, but was instead a complex product of the cultural and political milieu in which it occurs. In particular, he argued that important factors, such as the separation of corporate ownership and management, or oligopolies and their influence on government and military spending, have been largely neglected by most economists because they are not amenable to descriptions. axiomatic. In this sense, he worked on both political economy and classical economics.

Her work included several of the best-selling books throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In his first great work, American Capitalism, (American Capitalism: The concept of countervailing power, 1952) he points out that large corporations have displaced small or family businesses., and, as a consequence, perfect competition models cannot be applied in the US economy. One way to counter that power, according to Galbraith, is the rise of large unions. His main contribution to the field of economics is the so-called trilogy of American capitalism: The Affluent Society (1958), The New Industrial State (1967), and Economics. and Public Purpose (1973). Written in a clear and concise style, they were understandable to readers, not just economists. In The Affluent Society (The Affluent Society, 1958), he contrasts the opulence of the private sector with the greed exerted on the public sector, demonstrating that the US, in the In the fifties, it was the example of a country with a growing economy, but with great social inequalities within it. Finally, in The New Industrial State ( The New Industrial State , 1967) he points out that large corporations (such as General Motors) dominate the United States market. This, as a result of their great productive growth and the level of their operations, which allows them to control their markets.

After his retirement from Harvard as Paul M. Warburg Professor Emeritus of Economics, he continued in public life, publishing 21 new books. In the summer of 1973, Adrian Malone (BBC) asked him to do a television series on the history of economic or social ideas. Galbraith agreed. They titled it The Age of Uncertainty to reflect the contrast between the great certainty of the century XIX and economic thinking much less secure in its views of modern times. The series was written and filmed in three years and broadcast in 1977 on PBS and the BBC, it aired in 38 countries.

In addition to his books, he wrote hundreds of essays and several novels; one of which, A Tenured Professor, achieved critical acclaim. Galbraith wrote book reviews, such as the Iron Mountain Report on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace, a 1967 political satire, under the pen name Herschel McLandress, the name of a fictional Scottish mentor introduced as the Senior Lecturer. He also used the pen name Mark Épernay when he published The McLandress Dimension in 1963.

Galbraith does not meet the stereotype of an American economist, due to his iconoclastic ideas about the economy and the practices of his peers. His main concern was not with econometric analysis or economic theory, but with analyzing the consequences of economic policy on society and the political economy, in an accessible way and eliminating much of the jargon used by economists. His books put American society facing a mirror by warning of the structural problems of the economy, criticizing the Vietnam War and rethinking the role of the State, questioning the individualistic decision-making model and advocating the need for well-fare institutions state that even today, more than 50 years later, American society has pending or in danger of disappearing.

Economics Books

Galbraith was a major figure in institutional economics in the 20th century and provided an exemplary institutionalist perspective on economic power. His work includes elements of critical institutionalism, since it gives a central role to institutions and, in particular, to industrial organizations with an economic policy typical of the most progressive Keynesianism. Among the numerous writings of his, Galbraith considered The New Industrial State and The Affluent Society as the two best. As for later works, the economist and friend of his, Mike Sharpe visited him in 2004, receiving from Galbraith a copy of what would be his last book, The Economics of Innocent Fraud . Galbraith confided to Sharpe that "this is my best book", a statement Galbraith pronounced "a bit mischievously".

Following the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, his work The Great Crash, 1929 (1955) and others that warned of the dangers of unbridled speculation without proper government oversight received attention. of new readers. In 2010, the Library of America published a new edition of his major works, edited by his son, James K. Galbraith: The Affluent Society & amp; Other Writings, 1952-1967: American Capitalism, The Great Crash, 1929, The Affluent Society, and the New Industrial State. On this occasion, Bill Moyers interviewed James K. Galbraith about his father, his works and his legacy.

American Economy

In American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (1952) Galbraith concluded that the American economy was run by a triumvirate of big business, big unions, and an activist government. Galbraith defined the actions of industry and union lobbies as countervailing power, contrasting this arrangement with the period before the earlier Depression, in which big business had a relatively free rein over the economy. In his 1981 memoirs he reconsidered his thesis, since in his experience "numerous groups (the youth, the rural poor, textile workers and many consumers) remain weak and helpless."

His 1955 bestseller, The Great Crash, 1929, depicts the Wall Street crash of stock prices and how markets progressively decoupled from reality in a speculative boom. The book is also a platform for Galbraith's humor and his insights into human behavior when wealth is threatened. It has never been out of print.

In the best-selling The Affluent Society (1958), Galbraith summarized his view that to succeed, post-World War II America would have to invest heavily in issues like roads and education, using general tax funds.

Galbraith also criticized the assumption that the continued increase in material production was a sign of economic and social health. Because of this Galbraith is sometimes considered one of the first post-materialists. In this book, he popularized the old phrase "conventional wisdom." Galbraith worked on the book while in Switzerland and had originally titled it Why the Poor Are Poor , but changed it to The Affluent Society at the suggestion of his wife. Affluent society contributed (probably significantly, since Galbraith was an adviser to President Kennedy) to the "war on poverty," the government spending policy ushered in by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

The new industrial state

In 1966, Galbraith was invited by the BBC to present the Reith Lectures, a series of radio broadcasts, which he titled The New Industrial State. In six issues, he explored the economics of production and the effect that large corporations could have on the state.

In the print edition of The New Industrial State (1967), Galbraith expanded his analysis of the role of power in economic life, arguing that very few industries in the United States fit the model of perfect competition. A central concept of the book is the revised sequence. The "conventional wisdom" in economic thought he portrays economic life as a set of competitive markets governed, ultimately, by the decisions of sovereign consumers. In this original sequence, control of the production process flows from the consumers of the commodities to the organizations that produce those commodities. In the revised sequence, this flow is reversed and companies exert control over consumers through advertising and related marketing activities.

The revised sequence concept only applies to the industrial system, that is, the industrial core of the economy in which each industry contains only a handful of very powerful corporations. It does not apply to the market system in Galbraith's dual economy. In the market system, made up of the vast majority of business organizations, price competition remains the dominant form of social control. In the industrial system, however, made up of the 1,000 large corporations, competitive pricing theory obscures the relationship to the pricing system of these large and powerful corporations. In Galbraith's opinion, the main function of market relations in this industrial system is not to restrict the power of corporate giants, but to serve as an instrument for the implementation of their power. In addition, the power of these corporations extends to business culture and policy, allowing them to wield considerable influence over popular social attitudes and value judgments. That this power is exercised in the myopic interest of expanding commodity production and the status of a few is incompatible with democracy and a barrier to achieving the quality of life that the new industrial state with its wealth could provide.

The New Industrial State not only provided Galbraith with another best-seller, but also extended institutionalist economic thought once more. The book also filled a very pressing need in the late 1960s. The conventional theory of monopoly power in economic life holds that the monopolist will attempt to restrict supply in order to keep the price above its competitive level. The social cost of this monopoly power is a decrease in both the allocative efficiency and the equity of income distribution. This conventional economic analysis of the role of monopoly power did not adequately address the popular concern about the big corporation in the late 1960s. Growing concern centered on the corporation's role in politics, the damage to the natural environment from an absolute commitment to economic growth, and the perversion of advertising and other pecuniary aspects of culture. The New Industrial State gave a plausible explanation of the power structure involved in generating these problems and thus found a very receptive audience among the growing American counterculture and its political activists.

A third related work was Economics and the Public Purpose (1973), in which he expanded on these themes by discussing, among other issues, the subordinate role of women in the management of unrewarded consumption. and the role of the technostructure in large companies in influencing the perception of sound economic policy objectives.

Financial bubbles

In A Brief History of Financial Euphoria (1994), he describes speculative bubbles over several centuries, and argues that they are inherent in the free market system due to the "psychology of masses" and the "vested interest in the error that accompanies speculative euphoria". Furthermore, financial memory is "notoriously short": what currently appears to be a "new financial instrument" it's nothing like that. Galbraith notes: "The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel time and time again, often in a slightly more unstable version." Crucial to his analysis is the claim that the common factor in boom and bust is the creation of debt to finance speculation, which "becomes dangerously out of scale relative to the underlying means of payment." # 3. 4;. The 2008 financial crisis, which surprised many economists, seemed to confirm many of Galbraith's theses.

Memories

The first edition of The Scotch was published in the UK under two alternative titles: Made to Last and The Non-potable Scotch: Memoir of the Clansmen in Canada. It was illustrated by Samuel H. Bryant. Galbraith's account of his childhood environment in Elgin County in southwestern Ontario was added in 1963. He considered it the best bit of his writing.

Galbraith's memoir, A Life for Our Time was published in 1981. It contains discussion of his thoughts, his life, and his times. The portraits that he makes of the political or intellectual personalities with whom he collaborated or had a relationship throughout his life are especially interesting. He attributes part of the good reception of his works and collaborations to the merit of being a good writer, capable of expressing his ideas in a clear way for the general public, which made him highly sought after as a writer of speeches by his like-minded politicians. especially from presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson.

In 2004, the publication of an authorized biography, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics by friend and fellow progressive economist Richard Parker renewed interest in life and Galbraith legacy.

Legacy

Galbraith's main ideas centered on the influence of the market power of large corporations. He believed that this market power undermined the widely accepted principle of consumer sovereignty, allowing corporations to be price makers, instead of buyers of prices, allowing corporations with greater market power to increase production of their goods beyond an efficient amount. Furthermore, he believed that market power played an important role in inflation. He argued that corporations and unions could only increase prices to the extent that their market power allowed. He argued that in situations of excessive market power, price controls effectively controlled inflation, but warned that they would not be used in markets that are basically efficient, such as agricultural goods and housing. He pointed out that price controls were much easier to enforce in industries with relatively few buyers and sellers. Galbraith's view of market power was not entirely negative, he also noted that the power of American business played a role in the success of the American economy.

In The Affluent Society Galbraith asserts that classical economic theory was true for eras before the present, which were eras of 'poverty'. Now, however, we have moved from a time of poverty to an age of "opulence," and for such an age, an entirely new economic theory is needed. Galbraith's main argument is that as society becomes relatively wealthier, private companies must create consumer demand through advertising, and as this creates artificial opulence through the production of commercial goods and services., the public sector is neglected. He points out that while many Americans were able to afford luxury items, their parks were polluted and their children attended poorly maintained schools. He argues that markets alone do not provide (or fail at all) for many public goods, while private goods are typically 'overprovided'; due to the advertising process creating an artificial demand above the basic needs of the individual. This emphasis on the power of advertising and consequent overconsumption may have anticipated the decline in savings rates in the United States and other parts of the developing world. This perfectly describes the current type of capitalist society in most countries. Galbraith proposed restricting the consumption of certain products through greater use of Pigouvian taxes and land value taxes, arguing that this could be more efficient than other forms of taxes, such as labor taxes. Galbraith's most important proposal was a program he called "investment in men" - a large-scale publicly funded education program aimed at empowering ordinary citizens. An International Symposium in honor of John Kenneth Galbraith was held in Paris in September 2004, sponsored by the Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale, Dunkirk and the Institut de Gestion Sociale, Paris, France. A special issue entitled: Commemorating John Kenneth Galbraith's Centenary of the Review of Political Economy was dedicated to him in 2008 analyzing Galbraith's contribution to economics.

Criticism of Galbraith's work

Galbraith's work in general, and The Affluent Society in particular, have attracted sharp criticism from laissez faire supporters since the time of their publication. Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman in "Friedman on Galbraith and on curing the British disease" sees Galbraith as a 20th century 20th century version of the turn-of-the-century conservative radical XIX from Great Britain. He claims that Galbraith believes in the superiority of the aristocracy and its paternalistic authority, that consumers should not choose, and that all choices should be determined by those with "superior minds":

Many reformers—Galbraith is not alone in this—have as a basic objection to a free market that frustrates them in achieving their reforms, because it allows people to have what they want, not what reformers want. Therefore, every reformer has a strong tendency to be contrary to a free market.

Richard Parker, in his biography, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Economics, His Politics, characterizes Galbraith as a more complex thinker. Galbraith's main purpose in Capitalism: The Countervailing Power Concept (1952) was, ironically, to show that big business was now necessary to the American economy to maintain the technological progress that fuels economic growth. Galbraith knew that "countervailing power," which included government regulation and collective bargaining, was necessary to have balanced and efficient markets. In The New Industrial State (1967), Galbraith argued that the dominant American corporations had created a technostructure that tightly controlled consumer demand and market growth through advertising and marketing. Although Galbraith defended government intervention, Parker notes that he also believed that government and big business worked together to maintain stability.

Paul Krugman, who later won the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994, downplayed Galbraith's stature as an academic economist. In Peddling Prosperity, he casts Galbraith as one of many "political entrepreneurs," be they economists or think tank writers, left and right, who write solely for the public, as opposed to those who write for other academics, and who are therefore susceptible to making unwarranted diagnoses and offering simplistic answers to complex economic problems. Krugman claims that Galbraith was never taken seriously by other academics, who instead regarded him more as a "media personality." For example, Krugman believes that Galbraith's work, The New Industrial State, is not regarded as "real economic theory", and that Economics in Perspective she is 'significantly misinformed'. It is curious that Krugman would make these unsound criticisms of Galbraith when he himself is criticized in conservative academic circles for the same reasons.

Other highly influential economists today, such as Thomas Piketty, have taken up many of Galbraith's ideas and have supported their analyzes with vast amounts of demonstrative data.

Honors

John Kenneth Galbraith received the Medal of Freedom and the Presidential Medal of Freedom; in 1946 by President Truman and in 2000 by President Bill Clinton, respectively.

• Lomonosov Gold Medal in 1993
• Order of Canada (Officer) in 1997
• Padma Vibhushan, India, 2001

In 2010, he was the first economist to be included in The Library of America collection.

PhDs

Among those he received, the following can be highlighted:

• Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (LL.D) in 1958
• University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario (LL.D) in 1961
• University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario in 1965, the first granted by this university in which Galbraith studied Agriculture
• University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (LL.D) in 1965
• Boston College in Boston, Massachusetts (LL.D) in 1967
• Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York (LL.D) in 1967
• University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario (LL.D) in 1968
• Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts (DHL) in 1968
• Albion College in Albion, Michigan (D.Litt) in 1968
• Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois in 1970
• Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan (LL.D) in 1971
• York University in Toronto, Ontario (LL.D) in 1976
• Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey (LL.D) in 1979
• Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa (LL.D) in 1983
• Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts (LL.D) in 1988
• Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts (LL.D) in 1989
• Warsaw School of Economics in Warsaw, Poland in 1992
• London School of Economics in London, England (D.Sc) in 1999
• Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's, Newfoundland (D.Litt) in 1999

Bibliography (partially in Spanish)

• American capitalism (Ariel, 1952)
• The 1929 crash (Critical, 1954)
• The economy and the art of controversy (Ariel, 1955)
• Travel to Poland and Yugoslavia (Ariel, 1958)
• The opulent society (Ariel, 1958)
• The liberal hour (Ariel, 1960)
• The new industrial state (Ariel, 1967)
• The triumph (Plaza & Janés, 1968)
• Journal of an Ambassador (Plaza & Janés, 1969)
• Economy and subversion (Plaza & Janés, 1972)
• Economy and humor (Plaza & Janés, 1972)
• The economy and the public objective (Plaza & Janés, 1973)
• Passenger in China (Plaza & Janés, 1973)
• Money (Ariel, 1975)
• The Age of Uncertainty (Plaza & Janés, 1977)
• Introduction to the economy (Critical, 1978)
• The poverty of the masses (Plaza & Janés, 1979)
• Memories (Grijalbo, 1982)
• Rich nations, poor nations (Ariel, 1983)
• The anatomy of power (Ariel, 1984)
• History of the economy (Ariel, 1987)
• The culture of satisfaction (Ariel, 1992)
• A journey through the economy of our time (Ariel, 1994)
• Brief history of the financial euphoria (Ariel, 1994)
• A better society (Critical, 1996)
• By name (Critical, 1999)
• The economy of innocent fraud (Critical, 2004)