Canadian-American economist, Harvard professor for four decades, U.S. ambassador to India under Kennedy, adviser to four Democratic presidents, and — across a half-century of bestsellers — the most widely read American economist of the postwar era. Galbraith stood six-foot-eight and wrote like someone who had never been told that serious economics required either mathematics or humility; the combination made him unpopular in the technical profession and beloved by the general reading public, to the lasting irritation of his colleagues.
His major books advance a single connected argument against the inherited picture of the American economy as a competitive market populated by sovereign consumers. American Capitalism (1952) introduced his concept of countervailing power — the argument that large corporations are checked not, as orthodox theory imagined, by competition among small firms, but by equally large opposing organizations (unions, retailers, the state). The Affluent Society (1958) made the argument that American postwar abundance had been matched by what he called "private affluence and public squalor" — lavishly stocked supermarkets alongside underfunded schools, hospitals, and parks — and that the culture had lost the capacity to distinguish between needs that markets serve well and needs markets cannot reach. The book coined the phrase conventional wisdom, which he meant dismissively; the phrase outlived the dismissal.
The New Industrial State (1967) argued that the large modern corporation has become its own planning system — organized around what he called the technostructure of managers, engineers, and specialists — and that the textbook picture of the profit-maximizing firm run by its owners no longer fits the American economy at all. Economics and the Public Purpose (1973) extended the argument. Throughout, Galbraith's commitments were straightforwardly Keynesian and social-democratic: strong public sector, serious industrial policy, active macroeconomic management, and a willingness to say plainly that free-market economics, taken as a full account of modern life, is an ideology dressed as a science. The later A Short History of Financial Euphoria (1990) and The Economics of Innocent Fraud (2004) were concise, scathing late statements of the same lifelong case.