The eminent economist and public servant retraces the main and telling events and relationships of his eventful life and draws sharp portraits of some famous and infamous people met along the way.
"In the decades since World War II, no American writer has done more to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable than John Kenneth Galbraith." (USA Today)
'Many have been close to great events and great leaders. Few have combined that proximity with ability to write effectively, amusingly, even brilliantly about those events and people – about the great moments and low moments, the great men and women and those who were only interesting, entertaining or absurd.
John Kenneth Galbraith combines proximity with ability, as all who read this book will discover.'
John Kenneth Galbraith
John Kenneth "Ken" Galbraith (October 15, 1908 – April 29, 2006), OC was a Canadian-American economist. He was a Keynesian and an institutionalis, a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s and he filled the role of public intellectual from the '50s to the 1970s on matters of economics.
Galbraith was a prolific author who produced four dozen books and over a thousand articles 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). He taught at Harvard University for many years. 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 Kennedy. Due to his prodigious literary output he was arguably the best known economist in the world during his lifetime and was one of a select few people to be awarded the Medal of Freedom, in 1946, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000, for services to economics.