One hundred years after his birth, J. K. Galbraith s The Great Crash 1929 is again on the bestseller lists. And in the current financial and economic tumult, familiar Galbraithian concerns such as the power and dominance of overweening corporations, national and global poverty, and the careless destruction of the natural environment once again loom large in the public consciousness.

Galbraith s contemporaries included such towering intellects as Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Milton Friedman, Wassily Leontief, Simon Kuznets, James Meade, Nicolas Kaldor, and Joan Robinson....