Amartya Sen said the influence of John Kenneth Galbraith’s book The Affluent Society is so pervasive as to be taken for granted: “It’s like reading Hamlet and deciding it’s full of quotations.”
A counselor for presidents from FDR to LBJ, a maverick economist, academic gadfly, acerbic commentator on modern society, and bestselling author, Galbraith not only consistently challenged the “conventional wisdom,” he also coined the phrase.
We are proud to have published in paperback Galbraith’s 1998 book Created Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay, which showed how government policies in the 1990s widened the pay gap between different kinds of workers. We will be equally pleased this fall to reprint Richard Parker’s biography John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics, which even William F. Buckley called “the most readable and instructive biography of the century.”