Economist Kenneth Galbraith dies at 97

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who focused on core issues like the distribution of wealth, has died at a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 97.

Citing the late economist's son, Alan Galbraith, the newspaper said Galbraith was one of the most widely read authors in the history of economics.

Among his 33 books was "The Affluent Society", one of the rare works that forces a nation to re-examine its values, the obituary said.

Professor Galbraith was born in Canada in 1908 but moved to the US in the 1930s and became an American citizen in 1937. He was a follower of the British economist John Maynard Keynes, who argued governments could smooth the cycles of boom and bust by spending more in bad times and raising taxes when economies picked up. In 1948 he was appointed a professor at Harvard.

In the 'Affluent Society" he argued economies were dominated by corporations which decided what to produce and then used advertising to persuade consumers to buy things they did not need rather than build socially useful projects such as schools, roads and hospitals.