J K Galbraith: a 20th-Century Life Richard Parker Old Street Publishing, 820pp, £25
Speaking after the death of the liberal American economist J K Galbraith last year, Gordon Brown said he would be remembered “for his economic insights into our age”. But as this intelligent biography makes clear, Galbraith’s reputation has waxed and waned as the political centre of gravity has shifted, though his belief in the power of government to fix society’s ills persisted through seven decades of public life.
The Harvard economist Richard Parker relates with brio Galbraith’s rise from humble beginnings in rural Canada. After he had cut his teeth during the Depression, Galbraith’s intellectual course was set by the “tidal force” of John Maynard Keynes’s new arguments for increased public spending.
His 1958 bestseller, The Affluent Society, attacked the way corporations created “wants” for superfluous products while public “needs” such as healthcare went unfulfilled. But by the 1970s, Galbraith was being eclipsed by the monetarist Milton Friedman, whose low-tax, small-government vision energised the political right.
Today, Parker sees an echo of Galbraith in Amartya Sen’s work on global poverty. Sadly, this otherwise excellent account still refers to Galbraith as “the world’s most famous living economist”.
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