Archibald Galbraith, a Canadian schoolteacher, once climbed onto a platform atop a steaming pile of manure to address a group of Liberal party voters before the coming Ontario elections.

“Before I begin,” he said, “I must apologize for speaking from the Tory platform.” Later on, his teenage son, John Kenneth, would congratulate him on the dig, to which he [Archibald] would respond, “It was good. But it didn’t change any votes.” (Arthur Scheslinger, 1984, p. 7) So, from an early age, John Kenneth Galbraith was between the world of politics and pragmatism.

John Kenneth Galbraith was born in 1908. His father’s involvement in politics had a profound impact on the young John Kenneth, politicizing him at an early age. He originally studied Agricultural Economics at the Ontario Agricultural College, but would eventually say that he took his first “real” economics course at UC Berkeley, and that the economics instruction in Canada was “very poor” (Dunn, 2002, p. 350). As a graduate student at UC Berkeley, he continued his study of agricultural economics and worked as a research assistant for a “very zany old man by the name of Edwin Voorhies” (Kreisler, 1986). He stated that it was his study of agricultural economics that left him with a strong feeling that “social science should be tested by its usefulness,” an idea inspired by Veblen’s dichotomy between exoteric knowledge (knowledge that is valuable and applicable) and esoteric knowledge (knowledge that has no practical application, but because of that, is considered more “prestigious”). Galbraith believed that social sciences should be exoteric, not esoteric. In his book Economics and The Public Purpose, Galbraith develops this idea further, saying, “The ultimate test of a set of economic ideas is whether it illuminates the anxietes of the time” (Galbraith, 1973, p.198).

In the 1930’s, while Galbraith was studying to receive his Ph. D, it was clear that economic theory was not addressing the anxietes of the time. Economists were struggling to explain how free markets had led the United States to economic ruin. One in four Americans were jobless. Production had all but ground to a halt. Obviously, there were egregious errors in the accepted dogma, which stated that free markets left to their own devices would bring about efficiency and employment. Galbraith said that his method of coming to an understanding was to “for years…start with [Alfred] Marshall, see the world as it is, and make the requisite modifications” (Dunn, 2002, p. 351). Upon graduating, Galbraith traveled to Washington D.C. and took a position assisting with the implementation of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, before taking a position as a tutor at Harvard. At Harvard, he made speeches supporting the reelection of Roosevelt, cementing his initial ties with the Democratic party. Not long after, he was offered a fellowship at Cambridge, where the discussions centered around Keynes, who had just published his General Theory of Employment, Money, and Interest (Dunn, 2002, pp. 350-355).