John Kenneth Galbraith; Popularized Modern Economics

He served a year on the economics faculty at Princeton University in 1939, then came to Washington to work with the National Defense Advisory Committee, established to prepare the U.S. economy for war.

His mentor in the federal bureaucracy was Leon Henderson, a leading New Dealer. Henderson put Dr. Galbraith in charge of the price division in the Office of Price Administration, which was arguably the most powerful civilian post in the management of the wartime economy.

After two years, Dr. Galbraith and his staff had placed virtually all goods and services in the country under his control. But he had "reached the point that all price fixers reach -- my enemies outnumbered my friends."

In the midterm elections of 1942, the Democrats lost seats in Congress, and business interests were demanding a clipping of Dr. Galbraith's economic wings.

Starting in 1943, he spent five years writing and editing at Fortune magazine and took leaves of absence for special assignments.

After Germany surrendered in 1945, he went to Europe to direct the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. From interviews with top Nazi leaders who had been taken into custody, he concluded that extensive bombing by the Allies had done little or nothing to shorten the war. Of much greater import, he found, was the fact that "in reality, German war management was for a long time half-hearted and incompetent." He would find a similar lack of strategic effectiveness in the bombing of Japan.

Seminal Works

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After rejoining the Harvard faculty in 1949 as professor of economics, he wrote the books that brought him renown as an economic thinker. Besides "The Affluent Society," there was "American Capitalism" (1952), "The New Industrial State" (1967) and "Economics and the Public Purpose" (1973).

In "American Capitalism," he articulated his conception of "countervailing power" and new patterns of competition among big labor, big business and big government. The thrust of this theory is that the power of big producers is balanced against the strength of big unions and big purchasers, such as chain stores.

"The New Industrial State" theorized that the rise of giant multinational corporations had created a bureaucratic "technostructure" that exercised a powerful influence over the economy. In "Economics and the Public Purpose," he discussed a bureaucratic reciprocity between big government and big business that he said often worked against the public interest.

On the political front, Dr. Galbraith campaigned for John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election. In 1961 he took a two-year leave from Harvard to serve as ambassador to India. Aside from the India-China border war of 1962, there was rarely a full day's work to be done, so the ambassador used the extra time to write more books.

Among them were "Indian Painting" (1968), an art book he wrote with Mohinder Singh Randhawa; and his first novel, "The McLandress Dimension" (1963), a satire written under the pseudonym Mark Epernay.

After leaving New Delhi, Dr. Galbraith wrote "Ambassador's Journal" (1969), a day-to-day account of his service in India for which he received a guaranteed fee of $250,000 from Houghton Mifflin. "On this the federal taxes were sufficient to cover my ambassadorial salary of $27,500 annually with around a hundred percent additional return," he wrote in his autobiography.