# John Kenneth Galbraith Canadian-American economist (1908–2006), Harvard professor for four decades, ambassador to India under Kennedy, adviser to every Democratic president from Roosevelt to Johnson, and the most-read economist of postwar liberalism — which made him, for the free-market right, the most useful opponent it had. Six feet eight, a prose stylist who sold millions of copies, he wrote the books that told the affluent postwar public what its economy was, and the movement that built the [[Chicago School]]'s public reputation built it partly by answering him. ## The three ideas *American Capitalism* (1952) argued that the check on corporate power was not competition, which had largely disappeared, but **countervailing power** — unions against employers, chain retailers against manufacturers, the state against both — so that the antitrust ideal of many small competitors was a fiction and the real question was who balanced whom. *The Affluent Society* (1958) argued that a society that had solved production now suffered from "private opulence and public squalor": advertising manufactured wants, the market oversupplied consumer goods and undersupplied schools, parks and clean air, and the conventional wisdom (his phrase) lagged the reality. *The New Industrial State* (1967) argued that the large corporation was run not by owners or markets but by its **technostructure** — the managers, engineers and planners who controlled information — and that it planned its demand as surely as a Soviet ministry planned supply. The three together are a theory of an economy of big organizations in which price theory explains little, and they were the intellectual atmosphere of the Great Society. ## The target [[Milton Friedman]]'s *Free to Choose* was in large part a reply to Galbraith; their televised exchanges and Friedman's 1976 lecture "Galbraith and the Keynesians" made the pair the public face of the argument between the [[Keynesian Economics]] consensus and its challengers, and Galbraith's dismissal of the profession's mathematics ("the study of economics is to enable economists to avoid the study of anything else") cost him with academic economists as it gained him with readers. The stagflation of the 1970s was read as the refutation of his world — the technostructure could not, after all, plan its way past OPEC — and the deregulatory turn that followed was in part a repudiation of the balance-of-power state he described. What survives is more than the right expected: countervailing power is the premise of the [[New Brandeis Movement]]'s labor-market argument, "private opulence and public squalor" is the standing description of American infrastructure, and the technostructure reads today as a description of the platform firm. [[Economics Hub]] has the field; [[John Maynard Keynes]] the tradition he extended. ## See Also - [[Milton Friedman]] · [[Chicago School]] · [[Keynesian Economics]] · [[John Maynard Keynes]] · [[Economics Hub]] · [[New Brandeis Movement]]