Volume 52, Number 9 · May 26, 2005
A Mind of His Own
By Jeff Madrick
John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics
by Richard Parker
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,820 pp., $35.00
John Kenneth Galbraith has been a Harvard economist, an accomplished diplomat, a political activist, a close adviser to presidents, a novelist and memoirist, and the best-selling economic writer of his time. But among economists he was perhaps most known for, and proudest of, his economic apostasy. He refused to accept what he considered the simplifying assumptions and the mathematical models that were fundamental to both the liberal and conservative economic orthodoxy of his day. Richard Parker's comprehensive biography arrives at an appropriate time; many of the basic assumptions of orthodox economic theory that Galbraith challenged for much of his career are now being questioned within the orthodox tradition itself.
Review, 4815 words
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