A file photo of actor Salman Khan. Jodhpur Court has turned down Salman Khan's appeal and upholded his five years sentence on Friday. - PTI Photo

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Other economists, even many of his fellow liberals, did not generally share his views. “The distinctiveness of his contribution appears to be slipping from view,” Stephen P Dunn wrote in The Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics in 2002. Criticism did not sit well with Galbraith, who would respond his critics had rightly recognised that his ideas were “deeply subversive of the established orthodoxy.” “As a matter of vested interest, if not of truth,” he added, “they were compelled to resist.”

A major influence on Galbraith was the caustic social commentary he found in Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. Galbraith called Veblen one of American history’s most astute social scientists, but also acknowledged that he tended to be overcritical.

“I’ve thought to resist this tendency,” Galbraith said, “but in other respects, Veblen’s influence on me has lasted long. One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read.” Galbraith completed two books in 1952, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power and A Theory of Price Control. In American Capitalism, he set out to debunk myths about the free market economy and explore concentrations of economic power. He summarized the lessons of his days at the Office of Price Administration in A Theory of Price Control, later calling it the best book he ever wrote. “The only difficulty is that five people read it. Maybe 10. I made up my mind that I would never again place myself at the mercy of the technical economists who had the enormous power to ignore what I had written.” His two next books were aimed at a large general audience. Both were best sellers.

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