“He remained optimistic about the ability of government to improve the lot of the less fortunate. ‘Let there be a coalition of the concerned,’ he urged. ‘The affluent would still be affluent, the comfortable still comfortable, but the poor would be part of the political system.’“John Kenneth Galbraith, the iconoclastic economist, teacher and diplomat and an unapologetically liberal member of the political and academic establishment that he needled in prolific writings for more than half a century, died yesterday at a hospital in Cambridge, Mass. He was 97.”
(Excerpted from an obituary by Holcomb B. Noble and Douglas Martin, The New York Times, April 30, 2006, web edition. Photo from the obit is by Brian Snyder/Reuters.)
