As the rip-roaring 1990s were coming to a close, America's best-known economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, was out of favor. He didn't even receive an invitation to a 2001 conference on the New Economy at Harvard University, blocks from where he lived and where he had taught for decades. Galbraith's warnings against the excesses of unregulated markets, corporate greed, and unfathomed consequences of military spending didn't seem to have much to say in a time when the stock markets were soaring and the U.S. GDP was growing 6 percent annually.
Of course when the boom went bust, Galbraith was again on the pages of economic publications everywhere, and his ideas, whether you agreed with them or not, were starting to come back in play.
This new authorized biography from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Richard Parker comes at an incredibly fortuitous time for those studying economics, economic history, and the intersection of economics and public policy. At six-foot-seven-inches tall, Galbraith, now 97, not only towered above many of the last century's most influential figures, but his ideas—although often out of the mainstream of both economic and liberal thought—deeply influenced their thinking.
As Parker observes, "Despite decades of ferocious conservative criticism, a great deal of the world that Galbraith and his fellow reform liberals created between 1900 and 1980 endured into the new century: the minimum wage, workers' rights, vastly expanded and publicly financed healthcare, prohibitions on discrimination based on race and gender, an influential environmental movement (and environmental laws), a major reduction in poverty, a large middle class, expanded educational opportunities, Social Security."
The book follows a linear path through his birth in 1908 in Canada—in the middle of the Progressive Era—through the Great Depression, the New Deal, his career at Harvard, and his counsel to kings and presidents. Also included are Galbraith's views on recent government leadership. "It's safe to say," says Parker, "that virtually everything about ‘Reaganomics' and the Reagan Revolution appalled Ken Galbraith." Galbraith would revise that opinion only when George W. Bush introduced massive tax cuts, began military actions in Iran and Iraq, and increased deficits. "I never imagined," the author quotes Galbraith as saying, "I would look back on the Reagan era with nostalgic fondness."
Parker sees the "Galbraith legacy" continuing under a new generation of economists such as Amartya Sen, who look at the role economic and other institutions play that go beyond what they achieve in private markets.—Sean Silverthorne