Two giants and wizards

‘Investigation favourable except conceited, egotistical and snobbish.’ The outcome of the Federal Bureau of Investig- ation’s 1955 enquiry into John Kenneth Galbraith was eventually revealed to him under the USA’s Freedom of Inform- ation Act. It added to his already immense store of anecdotes about the richness and variety of American public life.

The FBI was not quite right. Other economists resented Galbraith as if he were conceited, egotistical and snobbish, but his actual or alleged vanity was not the reason. Instead Galbraith’s problem was that he was incapable of writing a dull paragraph. His active literary career spanned a period of over 70 years, starting with specialist papers on agricultural economics in the early 1930s and ending in 2005 with the preface to a collection (by other writers) on John Kenneth Galbraith and the Future of Economics. Several works — The Great Crash, The Affluent Society, The New Industrial State and the autobiographical A Life in Our Times — individually sold hundreds of thousands or even millions of copies.