Discover the Best Books Written by John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith, also known as Ken Galbraith, was a Canadian-American economist, diplomat, public official, and intellectual. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s. As an economist, he leaned toward post-Keynesian economics from an institutionalist perspective. Galbraith was a long-time Harvard faculty member and stayed with Harvard University for half a century as a professor of economics.

He was a prolific author, wrote four dozen books, including several novels, and published over a thousand articles and essays on various subjects. Among his works was a trilogy on economics, American Capitalism (1952), The Affluent Society (1958), and The New Industrial State (1967). Some of his work has been criticized by economists Milton Friedman, Paul Krugman, Robert Solow, and Thomas Sowell.

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 the Kennedy administration. His political activism, literary output, and outspokenness brought him wide fame during his lifetime. Galbraith was among the few to receive the World War II Medal of Freedom (1946) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2000) for his public service and contributions to science.

Even before becoming the president of the American Economic Association, Galbraith was considered as an iconoclast by many economists. This is partly because he rejected neoclassical economics's technical analysis and mathematical modeling as being divorced from reality. Following Thorstein Veblen, he believed that economic activity could not be distilled into inviolable laws but rather was a complex product of the cultural and political milieu in which it occurs. 

In particular, he posited that important factors, such as the separation between corporate ownership and management, oligopoly, and the influence of government and military spending, had been largely neglected by most economists because they are not amenable to axiomatic descriptions. In this sense, he worked as much in political economy as in classical economics.

His work included several best-selling books throughout the fifties and sixties. His major contribution to the field of economics is the so-called American capitalism trilogy: The Affluent Society (1958), The New Industrial State (1967), and Economics and the Public Purpose (1973). Written clearly and concisely, they were comprehensible to lay readers, not just economists.

After he retired from Harvard as the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics, Emeritus,[4] he remained in the public spotlight by continuing to write 21 new books, as well as completing a script in 1977 for a major series on economics for PBS and BBC television—The Age of Uncertainty, broadcast in 38 countries.

In addition to his books, he wrote hundreds of essays and several novels. Among his novels, A Tenured Professor achieved particular critical acclaim. Galbraith wrote book reviews, e.g., of The Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace, a 1967 political satire, under the pen name of Herschel McLandress, a name of a fictional Scottish mentor featured in the Tenured Professor. He also used the pseudonym Mark Épernay when he published The McLandress Dimension in 1963.