John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith was a Harvard economics professor and government adviser who became the most widely read economist in the English-speaking world. "The Great Crash 1929" (1954) is still the definitive popular account of the stock market crash. "The Affluent Society" (1958) argued that private affluence alongside public squalor was a distinctive problem of modern capitalism. "The New Industrial State" examined how large corporations exercise power. Galbraith served as US Ambassador to India under Kennedy and wrote extensively on inequality and economic policy. His concept of "conventional wisdom" — describing how widely accepted economic ideas resist change not because of their accuracy but because of their social acceptability — remains one of the most useful analytical categories for understanding why financial market consensus can persist long after it ceases to reflect economic reality.