Mr. Speaker, one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, John Kenneth Galbraith, a native of Iona Station, Ontario, died last Saturday at the age of 97.
A proponent of the school of thought of John Maynard Keynes and institutionalist theory, he defended the state's role as an economic regulator and a catalyst for wealth sharing.
An economic advisor to every Democratic American president since Roosevelt, he was one of the harshest critics of the triumphant market economy.
In his last book, The Economics of Innocent Fraud, he stated: “The best of the human past is the artistic, literary, religious and scientific accomplishments that emerged from societies where they were the measure of success...The more than minimal fraud is in measuring social progress all but exclusively by the volume of producer-influenced production, the increase in the GDP”.
We pay tribute to John Kenneth Galbraith, an outstanding economist and great humanist.