II.

Early Life and Career

John Kenneth Galbraith was born on October 15, 1908, in Iona Station, Ontario, Canada, into a farming community of Calvinistic Scottish descent. His father, a schoolteacher who later became a farmer, was a politically active liberal. His mother died when he was 14. In 1931 Galbraith graduated with a B.Sc. from Ontario Agricultural College. He then studied at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1932 with an MA in economics and a Ph.D. two years later. From 1934 to 1939 he was an economics tutor at Harvard University, in Massachusetts, where he met his future wife, Catherine Merriam Atwater (Kitty), who was studying comparative literature at Radcliffe College, which was Harvard’s affiliated undergraduate institution for women.

During 1937-1938 Galbraith was a research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, during which time he also attended the weekly seminar at the London School of Economics organized by Friedrich Hayek and Lionel Robbins. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1939, and from 1939 to 1942 taught economics at Princeton University, in New Jersey. From 1941 to 1943 he worked for the US government at the Office of Price Administration (first as assistant administrator, and later as deputy administrator) where, using selective and then more general price controls, he oversaw a national inflation rate controlled at around 2 per cent per annum, while production rose by about a third and unemployment remained minimal. Galbraith’s critics later suggested that this success gave him a false impression of the power of state planning and intervention in the economy.

From 1943 until 1948 he was an editor at the business magazine, Fortune, and twice took leave of absence, first to work on a survey of Allied strategic bombing during World War II, and second to serve as the director of the Office of Economic Security Policy in the US Department of State. In 1948 he returned to the economics department at Harvard University, becoming professor of economics in 1949. Although he officially retired from Harvard in 1975, his tenure there was not continuous as during this time he was employed in several significant political roles, variously serving in the administrations of Presidents Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy (as US ambassador to India in 1961-1963), and Lyndon Baines Johnson. Other high-profile roles were as chairman of Americans for Democratic Action in 1967-1969 and, his iconoclastic reputation notwithstanding, president of the American Economic Association in 1972. His numerous awards included being twice honoured with the Presidential Medal of Freedom (from Harry Truman in 1946 and from Bill Clinton in 2000), the Order of Canada in 1997, and the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second-highest civilian award, in 2001.