Galbraith: the economist with a public purpose

Abstract

In Economics, what is absolutely mysterious is probably unimportant, said John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) on several occasions about the usual economic language in comparison to the terminology used by other social sciences. Nonetheless, the american economist warned that this statement didn´t excuse anyone from mastering the fundamental ideas and conceptual apparatus of the discipline. Author of the trilogy The Opulent Society (1958), The New Industrial State (1967) and The Economy and the Public Purpose (1973), which received wide recognition from critics and readers; editor of Fortune in the immediate postwar period; Counselor of the presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson, as well as a successful columnist and writer, Galbraith fought what he called "conventional wisdom": the social acceptability of the principles of neoclassical economics. With this objective, the professor at Harvard University attracted a large audience with the purpose of imposing certain issues on economists. Galbraith estimated that if the postulates of "conventional wisdom" were vulnerable, unreal, citizen intuition would respond. Finally, Galbraith was a pioneer in the television broadcast of economic ideas and their consequences through the series that starred for the BBC The Age of Uncertainty (1977).