Galbraith, one of the towering economic thinkers of the 20th century, died of natural causes at a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Saturday, aged 97.

A towering man physically as well — he measured 6ft 8in — Galbraith was renowned for his ability to simplify complex economic theory and make it easily understood by the public.

Galbraith, a Canadian by birth who became an American citizen, was heavily influenced by John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, who advocated government spending to reduce unemployment. He often referred to himself as an “evangelical Keynesian”, was in favour of a much shorter working week, the women’s liberation movement and an international council to help victims of man-made disasters.

Galbraith advised Democratic presidents, including Franklin D. Roosevelt and Bill Clinton, and had an unrivalled influence on American economic policy. He travelled the world espousing his views.

After retiring in 1975 from Harvard, where he taught for half a century, Galbraith hosted the British-made television series The Age of Uncertainty. A decade earlier, in 1966, he gave the Reith lecture at Cambridge University.

Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England and a Cambridge graduate, paid tribute to Galbraith last night. “To the dismal science he [Galbraith] brought a sense of excitement and to the power of ideas,” he said. “Even those who disagreed with some of his views admired his wit and way with words.”

Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, paid tribute to Galbraith’s advice and influence on his own economic thinking: “John Kenneth Galbraith was a brilliant economist and writer and a great friend of the United Kingdom, and his books will be widely read in generations to come.

“Even in recent years in his nineties he was never slow to give me and others advice and he will be remembered for his erudition, his wit and eloquence, and particularly for his economic insights into our age.”

Galbraith was often at odds with mainstream economic thinkers and was an outspoken critic of supply-side economics, which dominated the public agenda in the 1980s.

A prolific writer, his best-known work was The Affluent Society, published in 1958, in which he coined the phrase “conventional wisdom”. The book caused America to reconsider its values and helped to propel Galbraith into the international spotlight.

Galbraith’s key argument was that America’s economy produced individual wealth but had not adequately addressed public needs, such as schools and roads. He argued that American economists and politicians were still using the assumptions of the world of the past, where scarcity and poverty were nearly universal.

Galbraith once said that he would like to be remembered for “bringing emphasis to an economic structure in which the characteristic organisation is the great corporation rather than the competitive enterprise”, as well as for recognising “economic life as a bipolar phenomenon”.

He is survived by his widow, Catherine, and three sons.

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