Political Economy and the Useful Economist

Assessing the importance of John Kenneth Galbraith as an economist is no easy matter, despite his being among the world’ s most famous economists in the second half of the twentieth century. Among American economists of any era, he is rivaled only by Thorstein Veblen, for the introduction of phrases that take on a life of their own in the literate idiom. Such phrases as countervailing power, the conventional wisdom, the affluent society, the new industrial state, and the technostructure have become familiar even beyond Galbraith’ s remarkably wide readership. In the twentieth century no other economist, excepting John Maynard Keynes, Galbraith’ s professional icon, can claim so secure a place in the belles-lettres of the English-speaking world. But his very fame complicates the assessment of Galbraith as an economist. His fame owed much to his penning best-selling books; this at a time when professional regard was based mostly on publishing articles in prestigious journals. Such articles were very esoteric and intended to be read by disciplinary, even subdisciplinary, cognoscenti and not the general intelligentsia. Hence this most famous economist was considered not to be an economist at all by many in the profession, though few would have not known who he was.