John Kenneth Galbraith: a giant.

• Author: Cabrera, Enriqueta
• Position: Obituary

When John Kenneth Galbraith died last April, at the age of ninety-seven, we lost one of the great American social thinkers of the twentieth century. Economist, author, academic, diplomat, and presidential advisor, he was one of the most prolific and widely read authors in the history of economics in the United States during the latter half of the last century. His thirty-three books held a mirror to U.S. society, shook up consciences, provoked controversy, broke new ground in economic and social thought, anticipated structural problems in the economy, explained dramatic moments such as the Great Depression or the end of the Cold War, criticized the Vietnam War, disseminated the theories of John Maynard Keynes, and defended their application in U.S. economic policy, with a social, public focus. Galbraith is regarded as the most widely read U.S. economist in the twentieth century. He had an enormous facility to understand and explain economic problems, not just based on the numbers, but from the standpoint of their social, national, and worldwide impacts.

An imposing man in many respects, Galbraith was a slender giant, over six and a half feet tall, with an angular profile. He was also an intellectual giant: sharp, agile, eloquent, lucid, and witty; he was a master of elegant irony, controversial by vocation, capable of unraveling the most complex problems and explaining them in simple terms. He was an excellent conversationalist. Over his life, he amassed over thirty honorary degrees from prestigious universities throughout the world.

Modesty was never one of his strong points, and he knew it. He recalled the tune he complained to John P. Kennedy because a New York Times article had described him as arrogant, and JFK had retorted, "Why shouldn't they? Everyone else does."

In 1990 I interviewed Galbraith in Mexico City. He spoke of two sensitive issues for the region: foreign debt and United States-Mexico economic integration. The NAETA negotiations were just beginning. He said that he had long advocated more open relations with Mexico, including on immigration matters. "We do not recognize enough just how dependent we are on Mexico, on its labor, for a broad range of very useful services in the United States. In the past we have obtained many benefits from the immigration of Mexican workers," he said. "I think that integration, overall, means that Mexican products and labor circulate more easily in the United States and that U.S. industries...