John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

Nothing so weakens a government as inflation.

All crisis have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment.

Only foolish people are completely secure.

I am for a close global association in trade and financial matters, rather than the opposite possibility of excessive nationalism, as manifested in the two world wars.

The capacity for erroneous belief is very great, especially where it coincides with convenience.

The consequences of successful action seemed almost as terrible as the consequences of inaction, and they could be more horrible for those who took the action. A bubble can easily be punctured. But to incise it with a needle so that it subsides gradually is a task of no small delicacy.

Few things in life can be so appalling as the difference between a dry antiseptic statement of a principle by a well spoken man in a quiet office, and what happens to people when that principle is put into practice.

The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.

Perhaps never before or since have so many people taken the measure of economic prospects and found them so favorable as in the two days following the Thursday [24th October 1929] disaster.

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.

Foreign policy is conducted for the convenience and enjoyment of people in Washington.

Under capitalism, man exploits man; while under socialism just the reverse is true.

If it is dangerous to suppose that government is always right, it will sooner or later be awkward for public administration if most people suppose that it is always wrong.

Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks.

If anything is evident about people who manage money, it is that the task attracts a very low level of talent, one that is protected in its highly imperfect profession by the mystery that is thought to enfold the subject of economics in general and of money in particular.

THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM requires that prices be under effective control. And it seeks the greatest possible influence over what buyers take at the established prices.

By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.

There are a significant number of learned men and women who hold that any successful effort to make ideas lively, intelligible and interesting is a manifestation of deficient scholarship. This is the fortress behind which the minimally coherent regularly find refuge.

The masters thought they were loved until one day one of their favorites farted loudly while serving dinner and the next day was gone. The very first manifestation of the classless society is the disappearance of the servant class.

No one was responsible for the great Wall Street crash. No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of free choice and decision of hundreds of thousands of individuals.

Fools, as it has long been said, are indeed separated, soon or eventually, from their money. So, alas, are those who, responding to a general mood of optimism, are captured by a sense of their own financial acumen. Thus it has been for centuries; thus in the long future it will also be.

The questions that are beyond the reach of economics-the beauty, dignity, pleasure and durability of life-may be inconvenient but they are important.

There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don't know, and those who don't know they don't know.

My rule on honorary degrees has always been to have one more than Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Men will look back in amusement at the pretence that once caused people to refer to General Dynamics and North American Aviation and AT&T as private business.

Even the word depression itself was the terminological product of an effort to soften the connotation of deep trouble. In the last century, the term crisis was normally employed. With time, however, this acquired the connotation of the misfortune it described.

Nothing is more portable than rich people and their money

None of this excuses anyone from mastering the basic ideas and terminology of economics. The intelligent layman must expect also to encounter good economists who are difficult writers even though some of the best have been very good writers. He should know, moreover, that at least for a few great men ambiguity of expression has been a positive asset. But with these exceptions he may safely conclude that what is wholly mysterious in economics is not likely to be important.

It's a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction.

Very important functions can be performed very wastefully and often are.

The first goal of the technostructure is its own security.

In the early days of the crash it was widely believed that Jesse L. Livermore, a Bostonian with a large and unquestionably exaggerated reputation for bear operations, leading a syndicate that was driving the market down.

The spirit should never grow old.

A good rule of conversation is never answer a foolish question.

Milton Friedman's misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried.

If you get a reputation for being honest, you have 95 percent of the competition already beat.

Had the Bible been in clear straightforward language, had the ambiguities and contradictions been edited out, and had the language been constantly modernised to accord with contemporary taste it would almost certainly have been, or become, a work of lesser influence.

She is a reflection of comfortable middle-class values that do not take seriously the continuing unemployment. What I particularly regret is that she does not take seriously the intellectual decline. Having given up the Empire and the mass production of industrial goods, Britain's future lay in its scientific and artistic pre-eminence. Mrs Thatcher will be long remembered for the damage she has done.

There's no question that in my lifetime, the contrast between what I called private affluence and public squalor has become very much greater.

Americans had built themselves a world of speculative pipe dreams. That world was inhabited, not by people who had to be convinced, but by people who sought excuses for believing.

In economics, it is often professionally better to be associated with highly respectable error than uncertainly established truth.

Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.

Economists, on the whole, think well of what they do themselves and much less well of what their professional colleagues do.

A point must be repeated: only the pathological weakness of the financial memory ... allows us to believe that the modern experience of ... debt ... is in any way a new phenomenon.

The greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt.

Oligopoly is an imperfect monopoly. Like the despotism of the Dual Monarchy, it is saved only by its incompetence.

According to the experience of all but the most accomplished jugglers, it is easier to keep one ball in the air than many.

You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon.

Those who yearn for the end of capitalism should pray for government by men who believe that all positive action is inimical to what they call thoughtfully the fundamental principles of free enterprise.

Things that come from the private sector are in abundant supply; things that depend on the public sector are widely a problem. We're a world, as I said in The Affluent Society, of filthy streets and clean houses, poor schools and expensive television.

When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic.

When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover.

I've long believed alas, that in highly organized industrial societies, capitalist or socialist, the stronger tendency is to converge - that if steel or automobiles are wanted and must be made on a large scale, the process will stamp its imprint on the society, whether that me be Magnitogorsk or Gary, Indiana.

Clerks in downtown hotels were said to be asking guests whether they wished the room for sleeping or jumping. Two men jumped hand-in-hand from a high window in the Ritz. They had a joint account.

That economics has a considerable conceptual apparatus with an appropriate terminology can not be a serious ground for complaint. Economic phenomena, ideas, instruments of analysis exist. They require names. Education in economics is, in considerable measure, an introduction to this terminology and to the ideas that it denotes. Anyone who has difficulties with the ideas should complete his education or, following an exceedingly well-beaten path, leave the subject alone. It is sometimes said that the economist has a special obligation to make himself understood because his subject is of such great and popular importance. By this rule the nuclear physicist would have to speak in monosyllables.

Much discussion of money involves a heavy overlay of priestly incantation.

There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed.

In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.

Almost every aspect of its (Federal Reserve) history should be approached with a discriminating disregard for what is commonly taught or believed.

Power is as power does.

Most of those who manage investment operations or who have sizable amounts of money to invest are, indeed, Republican in their politics. Naturally, perhaps inevitably, they believe in the politicians they support, the doctrines these profess, and the economic advantage flowing therefrom. It is especially easy for those seemingly so blessed to be persuaded of the new and approximately infinite opportunities for enrichment inherent in a Republican age under a Republican regime. So in 1929; so again before the crash in 1987. All so vulnerable and all so affected, whatever their politics, should be warned. T

Then the shit hit the fan.

However, it is safe to say that at the peak in 1929 the number of active speculators was less - and probably was much less - than a million.

No hungry man who is also sober can be persuaded to use his last dollar for anything but food.

Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

Writing is a long and lonesome business; back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?

Capitalism is chronically unstable.Boom and bust has always marked capitalism in the United States. There were panics in 1785, 1791, 1819, 1857, 1869, 1873, 1907, 1929 and 1987.In economies and politics, as in war, an astonishing number of people die, like the man on the railway crossing, defending their right of way. This is a poorly developed instinct in Switzerland. No country so firmly avows the principles of private enterprise but in few have the practical concessions to socialism been more numerous and varied.

American university presidents are a nervous breed; I have never thought well of them as a class.

It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.

It had been held that the economic system, any capitalist system, found its equilibrium at full employment. Left to itself, it was thus that it came to rest. Idle men and idle plant were an aberration, a wholly temporary failing. Keynes showed that the modern economy could as well find its equilibrium with continuing, serious unemployment. Its perfectly normal tendency was to what economists have since come to call an underemployment equilibrium.

Broadly speaking, Keynesianism means that the government has a specific responsibility for the behavior of the economy, that it doesn't work on its own autonomous course, but the government, when there's a recession, compensates by employment, by expansion of purchasing power, and in boom times corrects by being a restraining force. But it controls the great flow of demand into the economy, what since Keynesian times has been the flow of aggregate demand. That was the basic idea of Keynes so far as one can put it in a couple of sentences.

Poverty" Pitt exclaimed "is no disgrace but it is damned annoying." In the contemporary United States it is not annoying but it is a disgrace.

No politician can praise unemployment or inflation, and there is no way of combining high employment with stable prices that does not involve some control of income and prices. Otherwise the struggle for more consumption and more income to sustain it-a struggle that modern corporations, modern unions and modern democracy all facilitate and encourage-will drive up prices. Only heavy unemployment will then temper this upward thrust. Not many wish to confront the truth that the modern economy gives a choice only between inflation, unemployment, or controls.

Few economic problems, if any, are difficult of solution. The difficulty, all but invariably, is in confronting them. We know what needs to be done; for reasons of inertia, pecuniary interest, passion or ignorance, we do not wish to say so.

I write with two things in mind. I want to be right with my fellow economists. After all, I've made my life as a professional economist, so I'm careful that my economics is as it should be. But I have long felt that there's no economic proposition that can't be stated in clear, accessible language. So I try to be right with my fellow economists, but I try to have an audience of any interested, intelligent person.

People are the common denominator of progress. So ... no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills,and the other familiar furniture of economic development ... But we are coming to realize ... that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.

No society ever seems to have succumbed to boredom. Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace.

Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract.

The miserable consumption of the poor is partly the result of the ostentatious demands of the rich. There isn't enough for both, and the latter get far more than they need ... But could anything seriously be done about it?

Money is what fueled the industrial society. But in the informational society, the fuel, the power, is knowledge. One has now come to see a new class structure divided by those who have information and those who must function out of ignorance. This new class has its power not from money, not from land, but from knowledge.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

Men can labor to make sense out of single steps toward the goal without ever pausing to reflect that the goal itself is ludicrous.

I would now, however, more strongly emphasize, and especially as to the United States, the inequality in income and that it is getting worse - that the poor remain poor and the command of income by those in the top income brackets is increasing egregiously. So is the political eloquence and power by which that income is defended. This I did not foresee.

In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.

The notion of a formal structure of command must be abandoned. It is more useful to think of the mature corporation as a series of concentric circles.

The more underdeveloped the country, the more overdeveloped the women.

And there was a deeper, less visible effect of the Truman loyalty program. Seeing its consequences for certain individuals and fearing its intrusion on their own lives, many in the government sought protection by strongly asserting their anti-Communism. In the public action that ensued, policy was based not on reality but, instinctively or deliberately, on personal caution ... Those who urged a militant and sometimes military anti-Communism were considered sound, trustworthy and personally safe; those who questioned such a course were politically unsafe, possible even slightly disloyal.

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in - or more precisely not in - the country's businesses and banks. This inventory - it should perhaps be called the bezzle - amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks.

…

Just as the boom accelerated the rate of growth, so the crash enormously advanced the rate of discovery. Within a few days, something close

Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.

Inflation does not lubricate trade but by rescuing traders from their errors of optimism or stupidity.

The oldest problem in economic education is how to exclude the incompetent. A certain glib mastery of verbiage-the ability to speak portentously and sententiously about the relation of money supply to the price level-is easy for the unlearned and may even be aided by a mildly enfeebled intellect. The requirement that there be ability to master difficult models, including ones for which mathematical competence is required, is a highly useful screening device.

Trickle-down theory - the less than elegant metaphor that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.

Simple minds, presumably, are the easiest to manage.

Educators have yet to realize how deeply the industrial system is dependent upon them.

There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance.Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of the those who do not have insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.

One man's consumption becomes his neighbor's wish.

Nothing in modern attitudes is believed more to signify exceptional intelligence than association with large pools of money. Only immediate experience with those so situated denies the myth.

We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.