John Kenneth Galbraith

Published in 1958, 'The Affluent Society' argued that the United States had achieved unprecedented private prosperity while simultaneously neglecting public services and infrastructure, producing what Galbraith called 'private opulence and public squalor.' He warned that advertising and consumer culture perpetuated excessive private spending at the expense of critically needed public investment.

Galbraith served as deputy administrator of the Office of Price Administration during World War II, where he managed wartime price controls, and later as U.S. Ambassador to India from 1961 to 1963 under President John F. Kennedy. He was also a close advisor to both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson on economic and political matters.

In his 1967 book 'The New Industrial State,' Galbraith argued that modern large corporations are controlled not by individual entrepreneurs or shareholders but by a 'technostructure' of managers, engineers, planners, and technical specialists who make collective decisions. This challenged the classical economic assumption that firms are controlled by profit-maximizing individual owners.

Galbraith's progressive political views, his preference for institutional and literary analysis over formal mathematical modeling, and his public criticism of mainstream economics made him a polarizing figure in the profession. Many academic economists viewed his work as lacking the rigorous analytical foundations that increasingly defined postwar economics, even as he remained one of America's most widely read public intellectuals.