another intellectual icon passes

Last week's passing of famed and beloved urbanist Jane Jacobs, whose words and actions will continue to reverberate for many years to come, has been widely discussed. This weekend, we lost another of the 20th century's great writers and thinkers, Berkeley-trained Harvard University economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Professor Galbraith was a gifted and prolific writer and books of his that are decades old remain very worthwhile to read today. For me personally, I began my higher education as an Econ major, not a geographer. There is a very good chance that had the field of Economics remained more "Galbraithian" with a qualitative, historical interest in broad issues of social-political economy, rather than the super-quantified, abstract world of calculus, econometrics, and timeless/placeless "models", I would have remained in Econ. Anyways, the New York Times today contains a pretty good obituary.