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 John Kenneth Galbraith, the iconoclastic economist, teacher and diplomat and an unapologetically liberal member of the political and academic establishment that he needled in prolific writings for more than half a century—he was also the US ambassador to India in the 1960s—died yesterday at a hospital in Cambridge, Massachussets. He was 97.

Galbraith was one of the most widely read authors in the history of economics; among his 33 books was The Affluent Society (1958), one of those rare works that forces a nation to reexamine its values. He wrote fluidly, even on complex topics, and many of his compelling phrases—among them “the affluent society,” “conventional wisdom” and “countervailing power”—became part of the language. He was so prolific that Art Buchwald, the humorist, once introduced him by citing his literary production: “Since 1959 alone, he has written 12 books, 135 articles, 61 book reviews, 16 book introductions, 312 book blurbs and 105,876 letters to The New York Times, of which all but 3 have been printed.”

From the 1930s to the 1990s, he helped define the terms of the national political debate, influencing the direction of the Democratic Party and the thinking of its leaders. An imposing presence, lanky and angular at 6 feet 8 inches tall, he was consulted frequently by national leaders, and he gave advice freely, though it may have been ignored as often as it was taken.

Still, he advised President John F Kennedy and served as his ambassador to India. Though he eventually broke with President Lyndon B Johnson over Vietnam, he helped conceive Johnson’s Great Society programme and wrote a major presidential address that outlined its purposes. In 1968, pursuing his opposition to the war, he helped Senator Eugene J McCarthy seek the Democratic nomination for president. In course of his career, he undertook a number of government assignments, including the organization of price controls in World War II and speechwriting for Franklin D Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson. In fact, after Kennedy won the presidency in 1960, he appointed Galbraith the US ambassador to India. There were those, Galbraith among them, who believed the President had done this to get a potential loose cannon out of Washington. He said in his memoir: “Kennedy, I always believed, was pleased to have me in his administration, but at a suitable distance such as in India.”

Galbraith was fascinated with India; he had spent a year here in 1956 advising its government and was eager to return. He spent 27 months as ambassador, clashed with the State Department and was more favorably regarded as a diplomat by those outside the government.

He fought for increased American military and economic aid for India and acted as a sort of informal adviser to the Indian government on economic policy. Known by his staff as “The Great Mogul,” he achieved an excellent rapport with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and other senior officials in the government. During the border war with China in 1962, Ambassador Galbraith effectively took charge of both the American military and the diplomatic response. He saw to it that India received restrained American help and took it upon himself to announce that the US recognized India’s disputed northern borders. The reason he had so much control over the American response, he said, was that the border fighting occurred during the far more consequential Cuban missile crisis, and no one at the highest levels at the White House, the State Department or the Pentagon was readily responding to his cables.

Galbraith published Ambassador’s Journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy Years, a book based on the diary he kept during his time in India, in 1969. A year earlier he published Indian Painting: The Scenes, Themes and Legends, which he wrote with Mohinder Singh Randhawa. An avid champion of Indian art, he donated much of his collection to the Harvard University Art Museums.

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.

In a review of John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics by Richard Parker, J Bradford DeLong wrote that Galbraith’s lifelong sermon of social democracy was destined to fail in a land of “rugged individualism”. He compared Galbraith to Sisyphus, endlessly pushing the same rock up a hill that always turns out to be too steep.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen maintains Galbraith not only reached but also defined the summit of his field. In the 2000 commencement address at Harvard, Parker’s book recounts, Sen said the influence of The Affluent Society was so pervasive that its many piercing insights were taken for granted. “It’s like reading Hamlet and deciding it’s full of quotations,” he said.