The economist who set America's wartime prices trained in animal husbandry
John Kenneth Galbraith, a 6-foot-9 farm boy from Ontario, studied livestock before becoming one of the best-selling economists of the century. In the Second World War he helped run the agency controlling prices, wages and rents across the entire American economy, and he later landed on Nixon's list of political enemies.
He was born in 1908 in Iona Station, Ontario, to Scottish-Canadian parents; his father farmed, taught school and was active in the Liberal Party, and his mother died when he was fourteen. He started at a one-room school that still stands, then took an agriculture degree at the Ontario Agricultural College in 1931, majoring in animal husbandry. A scholarship worth 60 dollars a month carried him to Berkeley for a doctorate in agricultural economics.
Teaching at Harvard and Princeton in the 1930s, he became an American citizen in 1937 and spent a fellowship year at Cambridge, where Keynes's ideas left their mark. When war came, big deficits and loose money threatened runaway inflation. Serving from 1941 to 1943 as a senior deputy at the wartime price agency, known as the OPA, he helped oversee price and rent stabilisation. Its sweeping 1942 price regulation angered business, and enforcement staff logged a quarter of a million violations in 1943 alone.
After editing Fortune magazine, he returned to Harvard in 1949 and stayed for half a century. He wrote four dozen books, novels among them, and over a thousand articles. The Affluent Society in 1958 belongs to a trilogy on American capitalism that made him a household name; his economics leaned post-Keynesian with an institutionalist slant.
Galbraith served Democratic presidents from Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson and was Kennedy's ambassador to India. He is one of very few people to receive both the wartime Medal of Freedom, in 1946, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2000. He preferred to be called Ken rather than John, and he died in 2006.
Source: John Kenneth Galbraith
