John Kenneth Galbraith.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh
• Position: Author, interview

THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW

John Kenneth Galbraith is one of the few who can truly lay claim to the mantle of "public intellectual." His long and varied career as an economist, administrator, campaign adviser, political activist, diplomat, journalist, and professor has few equals.

Galbraith was born in Canada and immigrated to this country to complete a graduate degree in agricultural economics at the University of California-Berkeley. In 1934, he accepted a teaching job at Harvard, where he taught on and off for five decades. But he also has served in government. In 1940, he went to Washington to work for FDR. He ultimately was appointed deputy administrator in the Office of Price Administration, which made him the price-control czar. He then joined the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey and analyzed the effects of the U.S. bombing of Germany. His conclusion, that the bombing helped prolong the war, infuriated many. He also did a stint as an editor for Fortune magazine under Henry Luce, who hired him because, in Galbraith's words, he discovered that "with rare exception, good writers on business were either liberals or socialists."

From 1961 to 1963, Galbraith served as U.S. Ambassador to India, probably the most beloved to Indians of all the people who have held that position. He also acted as an adviser to the two doomed Adlai Stevenson Presidential campaigns and to the successful bid of John E Kennedy. In his spare time, he helped found Americans for Democratic Action and became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War. He campaigned for Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and for George McGovern in 1972. His last shot at Presidential politics was in the 1980 campaign of Ted Kennedy..

But it is his work in economics that has had the most effect. In The Great Crash 1929 (Houghton Mifflin, 1954), he talked about the speculative mania and the misplaced policies that led to the Great Depression. In The Affluent Society (Houghton Mifflin, 1958), probably his best-known book, Galbraith contrasted "public squalor" with "private affluence" and contended that massive public investment was needed to improve social goods in spheres where the private sector was unwilling to invest. In The New Industrial State (New American Library, 1967) and Economics and the Public Purpose (New American Library, 1973), he postulated that large corporations created a "technostructure" of professional managers, who could manipulate both supply and demand by creating artificial consumer desires. His most recently published book is Name-Dropping: From FDR On (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), a reminiscence of famous people Galbraith has encountered on his long journey.

On August 9, Galbraith went to Washington to receive a Presidential Medal of Freedom. The official citation said: "John Kenneth Galbraith has contributed immeasurably to the life of our nation. With clarity, wit, and a keen social conscience, he has made complex economic theories and processes comprehensible to a wide audience and highlighted the...