John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith—often called J. K. or Ken—was a Canadian-American economist, diplomat, public intellectual, and government official. From the 1950s into the 2000s, his books on economics regularly hit bestseller lists. His economic thinking was rooted in post-Keynesian and institutionalist traditions. During World War II, he served as deputy administrator of the Office of Price Administration, where he helped manage price, wage, and rent controls to prevent inflation and hoarding in a rationed, shortage-plagued economy.

Galbraith spent half a century on the Harvard faculty, teaching economics. He wrote prolifically—four dozen books, including several novels, and over a thousand articles and essays. A trilogy of his major economic works consists of *American Capitalism* (1952), *The Affluent Society* (1958), and *The New Industrial State* (1967). He was deeply involved in Democratic Party politics, working in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Under Kennedy, he served as U.S. Ambassador to India. His activism, writing, and outspokenness made him a widely known public figure. He is one of the few people to receive both the World War II Medal of Freedom (1946) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2000) for his public service and scholarly contributions. During the Watergate scandal, it came to light that his name had been placed on Nixon’s master list of political opponents.

Galbraith was born on October 15, 1908, in Iona Station, Ontario, to Sarah Catherine Kendall and Archibald “Archie” Galbraith, both Canadians of Scottish descent. He grew up in Dunwich Township, Ontario, with three siblings: Alice, Catherine, and Archibald William (Bill). As a teenager he adopted the name Ken and later disliked being called John. He grew to be very tall. His father farmed, taught school, ran a cooperative insurance company, and served as a local Liberal Party official. His mother, a homemaker and community activist, died when Galbraith was fourteen. The family farm sat on Thomson Line. Both parents supported the United Farmers of Ontario in the 1920s.

He began his education in a one-room schoolhouse still standing at 9468 Willey Road in Iona Station, then attended Dutton High School and St. Thomas High School. In 1931 he earned a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture from the Ontario Agricultural College (then affiliated with the University of Toronto), majoring in animal husbandry. A Giannini Scholarship in Agricultural Economics—worth $60 per month—allowed him to study at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a master’s and a Ph.D. in agricultural economics. There he worked with Professor George Martin Peterson; together they published “The Concept of Marginal Land” in the *American Journal of Agricultural Economics* in 1932.

After graduating in 1934, Galbraith became an instructor at Harvard, teaching there intermittently until 1939. He spent the 1939–1940 academic year at Princeton. In 1937 he became a U.S. citizen, renouncing his British subject status. That same year he took a year-long fellowship at Cambridge University in England, where John Maynard Keynes influenced his thinking. In 1938 he traveled across Europe, attending an international economic conference and refining his ideas. He worked briefly in the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the summer of 1934. In 1938, as a Harvard teacher, he led a research project for the National Resources Planning Board. From 1943 to 1948 he was an editor at *Fortune* magazine. In 1949 he was appointed professor of economics at Harvard, and he also taught at the Harvard Extension School.

During World War II, the U.S. economy had not fully recovered from the Great Depression. Large budget deficits and loose monetary policy for wartime production threatened inflation and a wage-price spiral. Galbraith, as a deputy administrator of the Office of Price Administration from 1941 to 1943, helped stabilize prices and rents. The OPA was created on May 11, 1941, as the Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply, renamed the Office of Price Administration on August 28, 1941. After the U.S. entered the war in December 1941, the OPA handled rationing and price controls. The Emergency Price Control Act of January 30, 1942, made it a separate federal agency, merging it with the Consumer Protection Division and the Price Stabilization Division of the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense (the National Defense Advisory Commission, created May 29, 1940).