Asked to name an economist, many Americans over the age of 30 would think of John Kenneth Galbraith, who has died at the age of 97. But he was both somewhat less and much more than a professional economist: he was an institution of postwar US life.

“After visiting Concord, Lexington, the Old North Church and Harvard, travellers are moved, however oddly, to view Galbraith,” he once wrote. The elder statesman of the Harvard economics department, Galbraith was much else: a New Deal bureaucrat, war-time planner, journalist, adviser of presidents and presidential hopefuls, diplomat, novelist. And, always and until the last, a committed polemicist. “If you can’t comfort the afflicted,” he told Harvard graduands, “then afflict the comfortable.”