John Kenneth Galbraith was born on October 15, 1908, in Dunwich Township in southern Ontario, Canada, the only son of William Archibald and Catherine Kendall Galbraith. His father was a farmer and schoolteacher.

Galbraith said he inherited his liberalism, his interest in politics and his wit from his father. When he was about 8, he once recalled, he would join his father at political rallies. At one event, he wrote in his 1964 memoir The Scotch, his father mounted a large pile of manure to address the crowd. “He apologized with ill-concealed sincerity for speaking from the Tory platform,” Galbraith related. At age 18 he enrolled at Ontario Agricultural College. Later, he completed his undergraduate work at the University of Toronto and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his master’s degree in 1933 and his doctorate in agricultural economics in 1934.

In 1937, Galbraith married Catherine Merriam Atwater, the daughter of a prominent New York lawyer and a linguist. He became an American citizen and taught economics at Princeton in 1939. At his death Galbraith was the Paul M Warburg emeritus professor of economics at Harvard, where he had taught for most of his career. He served as president of the American Economic Association, the profession’s highest honor, and was elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Many viewed Galbraith as the leading scion of the American institutionalist school of economics, commonly associated with Thorstein Veblen and his idea of “conspicuous consumption”. Some, therefore, said Galbraith might best be called an “economic sociologist”. Some suggested that Galbraith’s liberalism crippled his influence.

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