PERSON
John Kenneth Galbraith
The economist who named the conventional wisdom—the tall, acerbic diagnostician of manufactured consent, concentrated power, and the political economy of belief who gave every AI skeptic the vocabulary they still lack.
John Kenneth Galbraith stood six foot eight and spent half a century being the most famous economist in America who refused to think the way economists were supposed to think. Where the profession celebrated
markets as natural mechanisms, Galbraith insisted they were built and managed by large organizations that created the wants they then claimed to satisfy. He coined the term
conventional wisdom in
The Affluent Society (1958) to name beliefs that survive not because they are true but because they are comfortable and convenient to the powerful; the phrase entered the language and the critique it carried never went stale. His theory of the
technostructure—the managerial-technical caste whose specialized knowledge actually runs the modern corporation—reads today as a blueprint of the frontier AI lab: a planning organization that pursues capability for its own sake, manufactures the demand it claims to serve, and dresses institutional self-interest in the language of civilizational mission. And his image of
private opulence and public squalor—lavish