OBITUARIES FOR the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith have recalled his elegant prose and laconic wit. There is more biographical material in those characteristics than in Galbraith’s achievements as a public intellectual.

Even a sympathetic biography published last year concluded with the notably understated encomium — from the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen — that Galbraith’s work “doesn’t get enough praise”. More typical is the judgment of Paul Krugman in the mid-1990s that Galbraith “has never been taken seriously by his academic colleagues, who regard him as more of a ‘media personality’ ”.

Some motifs of Galbraith’s work have entered popular consciousness. Galbraith wrote of private opulence amid public squalor, illustrating it with a memorable metaphor of a family that travels by extravagant private car to picnic by a polluted river.

Yet while arguing for increased public expenditure on welfare, Galbraith gave scant attention to the limits of that approach. His writings perpetuate a debilitating weakness of modern liberalism: a reluctance to acknowledge that resources are scarce. In Galbraith’s scheme, said Herbert Stein, the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers: “The American people were only asked whether they wanted cleaner air and water . . . The answers to such questions seemed obvious — but they were not the right questions.”

Galbraith was no prophet. He maintained that the importance of planning augured a convergence of economic systems in the communist East and capitalist West. When writing about the Soviet Union, which exemplified public squalor amid private penury, Galbraith was obtuse. In 1984 he wrote that the “Soviet system has made great economic progress in recent years . . . One can see it in the appearance of solid wellbeing of the people in the streets.” Of China, Galbraith ventured: “Dissidents are brought firmly into line . . . but one suspects with great politeness.” This was shortly after the Cultural Revolution, which was, historians record, not a genteel affair.

J. K. Galbraith lived long, productively and happily. His contentment as public servant and intellectual may be partly attributable to the fact that he was, at the end of his life, almost as politically innocent as he had been at the start of it.