In The Great Crash 1929, (1955) he recalled the mistakes of an earlier day and suggested that some were being repeated. As the book appeared, Galbraith testified at a Senate hearing and said that another crash was inevitable. The stock market dropped sharply that day, and he was widely blamed.

In The New Industrial State, he tried to trace the shift of power from the landed aristocracy through industrialists to the technical and managerial experts of modern corporations. He called for a new class of intellectuals and professionals to determine policy.

In 1977 he wrote and narrated ‘The Age of Uncertainty,’ a 13-part TV series surveying 200 years of economic theory and practice. In 1990 he wrote A Tenured Professor. In 1996, as he approached his 90th year, he wrote The Good Society. The Essential Galbraith (2001), was a collection of essays and excerpts. Another, Name-Dropping from FDR (1999), recounted encounters with the powerful, including President Kennedy’s response when Galbraith complained that an article in The New York Times had described him as arrogant. Kennedy retorted that he didn’t see why it shouldn’t: “Everybody else does.”

In 2004, at the age of 95, he published The Economics of Innocent Fraud, a short book that questioned much of the standard economic wisdom. “Let there be a coalition of the concerned,” he urged. “The affluent would still be affluent, the comfortable still comfortable, but the poor would be part of the political system.”

HOLCOMB B NOBLE & DOUGLAS MARTIN