70 Facts About Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith, known as Ken Galbraith, was a Canadian-American economist, diplomat, public official, and intellectual.

Kenneth Galbraith was a long-time Harvard faculty member and stayed with Harvard University for half a century as a professor of economics.

Kenneth Galbraith was a prolific author and wrote four dozen books, including several novels, and published more than a thousand articles and essays on various subjects.

Kenneth Galbraith served as United States Ambassador to India under the Kennedy administration.

Kenneth Galbraith was one of the few to receive both the World War II Medal of Freedom and the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his public service and contributions to science.

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Kenneth Galbraith had three siblings: Alice, Catherine, and Archibald William .

Kenneth Galbraith's father was a farmer, school teacher, head of a cooperative insurance company, and local official of the Liberal Party.

In 1931, Kenneth Galbraith graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture from the Ontario Agricultural College, which was then an associate agricultural college of the University of Toronto.

Kenneth Galbraith was awarded a Giannini Scholarship in Agricultural Economics that allowed him to travel to Berkeley, California, where he received masters and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in agricultural economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Kenneth Galbraith was taught economics by Professor George Martin Peterson, and together they wrote an economics paper titled "The Concept of Marginal Land" in 1932 that was published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

Kenneth Galbraith taught intermittently at Harvard in the period 1934 to 1939.

Kenneth Galbraith then traveled in Europe for several months in 1938, attending an international economic conference and developing his ideas.

Kenneth Galbraith served for a few months in summer 1934 in the U S Department of Agriculture.

Kenneth Galbraith oversaw a mandatory and vigorous price regulation that started in May 1942 after OPA introduced the General Maximum Price Regulation .

Kenneth Galbraith had returned to Washington in mid-1940, after Paris fell to the Germans, initially to help ready the nation for war.

Kenneth Galbraith worked for Luce for five years and expounded Keynesianism to the American business leadership.

Kenneth Galbraith was combining his writing with numerous speeches to business groups and local Democratic party meetings, as well as frequently testifying before Congress.

Kenneth Galbraith contributed to the survey's unconventional conclusion about general ineffectiveness of strategic bombing in stopping the war production in Germany, which went up instead.

Reluctant to modify the survey's results, Kenneth Galbraith described the willingness of public servants and institutions to bend the truth to please the Pentagon as the "Pentagonania syndrome".

In February 1946, Kenneth Galbraith took a leave of absence from his magazine work for a senior position in the State Department as director of the Office of Economic Security Policy where he was nominally in charge of economic affairs regarding Germany, Japan, Austria, and South Korea.

Kenneth Galbraith disliked his superior, the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, writing to Kennedy that trying to communicate via Rusk was "like trying to fornicate through a mattress".

India was considered by Kennedy to be important not just in its own right, but because an Indian diplomat always served as the chief commissioner of the International Control Commission, and thus in this way, Kenneth Galbraith came to be involved in American policy towards Southeast Asia from his perch as an ambassador in New Delhi.

Kenneth Galbraith noted that the ICC was responsible for Laos as well as the two Vietnams, and he had Nehru's word that the Indian diplomats on the ICC were willing to serve as honest brokers for a peace deal to make Laos neutral in the Cold War.

In November 1961, Kenneth Galbraith visited South Vietnam, where he presented an unflattering picture of the regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem saying "we are now married to failure" and advised finding a new South Vietnamese leader, saying "nothing succeeds like successors".

In January 1963, when the Polish Foreign Minister Adam Rapacki visited New Delhi, Kenneth Galbraith met with him to declare to him his "despair" about Kennedy's Vietnam policies and to ask that Poland as one of the three members of the ICC try help find a diplomatic solution to the Vietnam war.

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Kenneth Galbraith told Rapacki that he favored an agreement to neutralize the two Vietnams similar to the neutralization agreement signed for Laos in 1962.

Kenneth Galbraith advised Johnson the beginning of the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" in China represented an opportunity for a diplomatic settlement of the Vietnam war, predicting that Mao Zedong would lose interest in Vietnam now that he had launched his Cultural Revolution.

Rostow, wrote the reply to Kenneth Galbraith that was signed by Johnson, curtly declaring: "I have never doubted your talent for political craftsmanship, and I am sure you could devise a script that would appear to justify our taking an unjustifiable course in South Vietnam".

In early 1968, Kenneth Galbraith endorsed Senator Eugene McCarthy, who ran against Johnson on an anti-war platform.

The day after the New Hampshire primary, Kenneth Galbraith was widely cheered by his students when he entered his lecture hall at Harvard.

Kennedy asked Kenneth Galbraith to withdraw his endorsement of McCarthy and to endorse him instead, a request that Kenneth Galbraith refused.

Kenneth Galbraith had been friends with John Kennedy, but his relations with Robert were more difficult, as Kenneth Galbraith found Robert too rigid, utterly convinced that he was always right.

Kenneth Galbraith later said that with Robert Kennedy "You were either for the cause or against it, with the Kennedys or a leper".

At the chaotic and violent Democratic National Convention in August 1968 in Chicago, Kenneth Galbraith attended as the floor manager for the McCarthy campaign.

Amid what was later called a "police riot", as the Chicago police fought in the streets with anti-Vietnam war protesters, Kenneth Galbraith held an impromptu speech outside the Hilton Hotel before a group of demonstrators, urging them to reject violence and to have patience, while assuring them that the American system was capable of reform and change.

Kenneth Galbraith pointed to the armed Illinois National Guardsmen standing in the background and said that they, unlike the Chicago police, were not the enemy, as he maintained that most of the young men who joined the Illinois National Guard had only done so to avoid being drafted to fight in Vietnam.

Kenneth Galbraith quarreled with Johnson supporters on the convention floor as he sought to add a peace plank to the Democratic platform, which Johnson saw as an insult to himself, and ordered the delegates to reject.

Kenneth Galbraith talked about rationing and especially about trickery during fuel allocation.

Kenneth Galbraith advocated for minimal financial requirement and infrastructure projects.

Kenneth Galbraith became the first person to earn honorary citizenship of Palau.

Kenneth Galbraith was awarded an honorary doctorate from Memorial University of Newfoundland at the fall convocation of 1999, another contribution to the impressive collection of approximately fifty academic honorary degrees bestowed upon Galbraith.

Kenneth Galbraith is interred at Indian Hill Cemetery in Middletown, Connecticut.

Kenneth Galbraith's work included several best selling books throughout the fifties and sixties.

Kenneth Galbraith used the pseudonym, Mark Epernay, when he published The McLandress Dimension in 1963.

Kenneth Galbraith was an important figure in 20th-century institutional economics, and provided an exemplary institutionalist perspective on economic power.

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Kenneth Galbraith defined the actions of the industry lobby groups and unions as countervailing power.

Kenneth Galbraith contrasted this arrangement with the period prior to the previous Depression, when big business had relatively free rein over the economy.

Kenneth Galbraith critiqued the assumption that continually increasing material production is a sign of economic and societal health.

Kenneth Galbraith worked on the book while in Switzerland and had originally titled it Why The Poor Are Poor, but changed it to The Affluent Society at his wife's suggestion.

In 1966, Kenneth Galbraith was invited by the BBC to present the Reith Lectures, a series of radio broadcasts, which he titled The New Industrial State.

Kenneth Galbraith believed that this market power weakened the widely accepted principle of consumer sovereignty, allowing corporations to be price makers, rather than price takers, allowing corporations with the strongest market power to increase the production of their goods beyond an efficient amount.

Kenneth Galbraith further believed that market power played a major role in inflation.

Kenneth Galbraith argued that corporations and trade unions could only increase prices to the extent that their market power allowed.

Kenneth Galbraith argued that in situations of excessive market power, price controls effectively controlled inflation, but cautioned against using them in markets that were basically efficient such as agricultural goods and housing.

Kenneth Galbraith noted that price controls were much easier to enforce in industries with relatively few buyers and sellers.

Kenneth Galbraith argues that markets alone will under-provide for many public goods, whereas private goods are typically "over-provided" due to the process of advertising creating an artificial demand above the individual's basic needs.

Kenneth Galbraith proposed curbing the consumption of certain products through greater use of pigovian taxes and land value taxes, arguing that this could be more efficient than other forms of taxation, such as labor taxes.

Kenneth Galbraith's major proposal was a program he called "investment in men"—a large-scale, publicly funded education program aimed at empowering ordinary citizens.

An International Symposium to honor John Kenneth Galbraith, sponsored by the l'Universite du Littoral Cote d'Opale, Dunkerque and the Institut de Gestion Sociale, Paris, France, was held in September 2004 in Paris.

Three days before his death, Galbraith urged his son, economist James K Galbraith, to "write a short book on corporate predation"; the younger Galbraith completed The Predator State in 2008.

Kenneth Galbraith knew that the "countervailing power", which included government regulation and collective bargaining, was necessary to balanced and efficient markets.

Krugman asserts that Kenneth Galbraith was never taken seriously by fellow academics, who instead viewed him as more of a "media personality".

Thomas Sowell wrote in his 1995 book The Vision of the Anointed that Galbraith was a notable "teflon prophet" alongside American biologist Paul R Ehrlich, and institutes like the Club of Rome and Worldwatch Institute; they were utterly certain in their predictions, yet completely disproven empirically, though their reputations remained perfectly undamaged.

Sowell first noted that in The Affluent Society, Kenneth Galbraith argued that discussions of income inequality in the United States appeared to be declining in urgency.

However, Sowell contended that since 1958, the year Kenneth Galbraith's book was written, preoccupation with income distribution had been at an all-time high.

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John Kenneth Galbraith was one of the few people to receive both the World War II Medal of Freedom and the Presidential Medal of Freedom; respectively in 1946 from President Truman and in 2000 from President Bill Clinton.

Kenneth Galbraith was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1952 and the American Philosophical Society in 1980.

Kenneth Galbraith was a recipient of Lomonosov Gold Medal in 1993 for his contributions to science.

Kenneth Galbraith was appointed to the Order of Canada in 1997 and, in 2001, awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian award, for his contributions to strengthening ties between India and the United States.

John Kenneth Galbraith received fifty Honorary Degrees from institutions around the world:.