John Kenneth Galbraith
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Canadian-born John Kenneth Galbraith is a Harvard professor whose views on industrial societies and their lack of competitive markets have made him one of the world's most recognized modern economists. This interview covers Galbraith's views on economic theory, his personal history, and the impact of some key economic and political leaders. Depression-Era Economics: Looking for a Remedy INTERVIEWER: What drew you into economics? What attracted you to this profession? JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH: Oh, there was not a question about that. In 1931, I graduated from college in Canada in agriculture, and I had a choice at that time between going to a leisurely, agreeable academic world on a scholarship, a fellowship in California, and a hardslugging job, work on a Canadian farm. Very few decisions have I made with such ease. When I got to Cal-Berkeley in the summer of '31, [it] was at the bottom of the Great Depression. To be in favor of what existed, not to have some kind of idea as to what should be done, was a desertion of all responsibility, so I got myself very early more and more involved in economic politics. I went to work for the New Deal in the summer of 1934. INTERVIEWER: Can you give a sense of how bleak and how despairing things seemed in the early '30s? JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH: Well, there were two ways of that. A university was in many ways a poor way to see that, because you were surrounded by people with secure income and a happy life, relatively speaking. But one couldn't go to the docks in San Francisco, one couldn't go to the farms, one couldn't go to the slums of Oakland without seeing how many people were on the edge of despair and how fortunate you were as compared with the ordinary citizen at the time. And that was, I hope, the factor that involved me more deeply in progressive economics.... The diamond feature of those years, of that decade, [was] the sense that nothing was working. And those of us in universities—I was then first at California and then at Harvard, having recently come from Canada—[we] had a special sense of responsibility, because our