John Kenneth Galbraith was a man of stature in every sense. His six foot eight frame finally came to rest last week, at the age of 97—two years after he published the last of his 33 books. Any one of his careers as economist, diplomat, political adviser, bureaucrat, and novelist, would have been enough for one life. The life that lives on after him, is his role as ironic Cassandra to the Pollyanna nonsense that passes for economic theory today.

In this role, he maintained the tradition of his great predecessor Thorstein Veblen, who, at the end of the 19^th century, championed evolutionary thinking, and mocked the pseudo-scientific pretensions of the emerging “Neoclassical” school of economic thought. Unfortunately, despite Veblen's best sardonic efforts, this School, with its mechanical metaphors for the economy, and its fetish for seeing equilibrium in the midst of chaos, rose to dominate economics in the early 20^th century.

Then came the Great Depression—a “disequilibrium” event, if ever there was one. Galbraith was a young man of 21 when the Stock Market Crash of 1929 brought the Roaring Twenties to a shuddering halt. Neoclassicism floundered when confronted by a phenomenon it believed could not happen, and was routed by Keynes's distinctly non-orthodox vision of economics. Galbraith embraced Keynes, and achieved the pinnacle of economic and political influence in the late Depression, World War II, and early post-War years.

He was not to stay long on the mountain top. As the political tide turned against him, with Democrats giving way to the Republicans, so too in economics, the tide turned back in favour of the Neoclassical School. Even before “Tricky Dicky” intoned that “We are all Keynesians now”, it transpired that Neoclassical economics had not died, but had merely adopted the Transylvanian state of the undead.

Fundamentally neoclassical economists, from Paul Samuelson to Milton Friedman, undermined Keynesian economics from within, on the grounds that one could not get “Keynesian” results from Neoclassical microeconomic foundations. Rather than seeing this as a reason to abandon neoclassical micro, it was used as the justification to “reform” Keynes.

Galbraith then truly stood in Veblen's shoes, fighting a losing rearguard action against a resurgent orthodoxy that saw the atomistic consumer, and the single-operator firm, as the basic units of analysis, and that hailed the market as king. Against these, Galbraith erected his vision of advanced capitalism as “The New Industrial State”, where a handful of major corporations dominated the economic landscape, and consumers and the market were made, as much as possible, subservient to the corporation. In a characteristic phrase, he remarked that the dominant view “by the uncouth, would be called drivel”.

There is no doubt that Galbraith's vision was, and is, far more realistic than the neoclassical fiction of competitive markets. But in economics, what wins the day is not realism, but the capacity to construct a mathematical model. Galbraith provided no such toy—nor could one be provided, with the mathematical and computing tools of the 1960s. He also focused more on the sociology of capitalism than its dynamics, and the latter is needed to make modelling possible. Joseph Schumpeter, the other great evolutionary economist, had provided a dynamic foundation decades before Galbraith, and it is to Schumpeter—rather than to Veblen and Galbraith—that modern evolutionary economists trace their lineage.

The history of economic thought is therefore likely to inter Galbraith with Veblen: two iconoclasts who railed against cant masquerading as science, but who did not themselves provide a basis on which a true evolutionary science of economics could be constructed.

Such a fate is still an honour. Like Veblen, Galbraith showed that an interest in economics was not a bar to colourful expression, or biting disdain. One could be accorded grudging membership of “the dismal science”, yet still write phrases that turned heads, and hearts. One could live amongst Philistines and simpletons, yet still enjoy the urbane life, and write of the real complexities of modern society, rather than the fictional world of a village fair.

Galbraith's language is therefore likely to be his real gift to future generations of economists. A troubled neoclassical is more likely to find epiphany in the witty phrases of JK, than in the complex computer models of modern evolutionary economists.

Foremost amongst these, is the aphorism Galbraith coined to describe the ever-growing inequality that characterised the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries: that after the Great Society experiment came to an end, we found ourselves in a time of “Private Affluence, and Public Squalor”. How true that is!