John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Truth has anciently been called the first casualty of war. Money may, in fact, have priority. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Men of conservative temperament have long suspected that one thing leads to another. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Very important functions can be performed very wastefully and often are. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Only foolish people are completely secure. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Let's begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes-indeed, deletes-the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Talk of revolution is one of avoiding reality. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

In central banking as in diplomacy, style, conservative tailoring, and an easy association with the affluent count greatly and results far much less. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

SOME YEARS, like some poets,and politicians and some lovely women, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot, and 1929 was clearly such a year. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

In the market economy the price that is offered is counted upon to produce the result that is sought. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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

A more important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

The members of the functional and socially mobilized under class must, in some very real way, be seen as the architects of their own fate. If not, they could be, however marginally, on the conscience of the comfortable. There could be a disturbing feeling, however fleeting, of unease, even guilt. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Educators have yet to realize how deeply the industrial system is dependent upon them. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced. ~ Anthony Burgess

The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

No grant of feudal privilege has ever equaled, for effortless return, that of the grandparent who bought and endowed his descendants with a thousand shares of General Motors or General Electric. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Much discussion of money involves a heavy overlay of priestly incantation. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

In recent times no problem has been more puzzling to thoughtful people than why, in a troubled world, we make such poor use of our affluence. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Foreign policy is conducted for the convenience and enjoyment of people in Washington. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

The process by which wants are now synthesized is a potential source of economic instability. Production and therewith employment and social security are dependent on an inherently unstable process of consumer debt creation. This may one day falter. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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

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. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

But it can be laid down as a rule that those who speak most of liberty are least inclined to use it. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

No intelligence system can predict what a government will do if it doesn't know itself. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Nothing so weakens a government as inflation. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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

If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Who is king in the world of the blind when there isn't even a one eyed man? ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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

Few things are as immutable as the addiction of political groups to the ideas by whichthey have once won office. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

I think without a doubt, that what is called "financial genius" is merely a rising market. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Conscience is better served by a myth. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

The ideas by which people ... interpret their existence and in measure guide their behavior, were not forged in a world of wealth. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Seaboard Air Line, which was thought by numerous innocents to provide a foothold in aviation, was another favorite, although, in fact, it was a railroad. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

There is no name for all who participate in group decision-making or the organization which they form. I propose to call this organization the Technostructure. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

In a world where for pedagogic and other purposes a very large number of economists is required, an arrangement which discourages many of them from ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography? ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Preservationists are the only people in the world who are invariably confirmed in their wisdom after the fact. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Men are, in fact, either sustained by organization or they sustain organization. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

The first goal of the technostructure is its own security. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Only men of considerable vanity write books; consistently therewith, I worried lest the world were exchanging an irreplaceable author for a more easily purchased diplomat. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

In the old days, land was important as the giver of all things. That period is gone now. Technology and brainpower are all that matters and yet conflicts over land, specially one like on the India-China border, that yields nothing, continue. This is a burden of ancient history that we continue to carry. If tomorrow there is settlement on planet Mars, we will begin to worry if others are interested. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

The charge that an idea is radical, impractical, or long- haired is met by showing that a prominent businessman has favored it?an additional tactic in this strategy of defense?is to assert that Winston Churchill once sponsored the particular idea. If one is challenged, a sufficiently careful investigation will show that he did. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Genius is a rising stock market. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

The worst continued to worsen. What looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have been only the beginning. Nothing could have been more ingeniously designed to maximize the suffering, and also to insure that as few people as possible escape the common misfortune. The fortunate speculator who had funds to answer the first margin call presently got another and equally urgent one, and if he met that there would still be another. In the end all the money he had was extracted from him and lost. The man with the smart money, who was safely out of the market when the first crash came, naturally went back in to pick up bargains. The bargains then suffered a ruinous fall. Even the man who waited for volume of trading to return to normal and saw Wall Street become as placid as a produce market, and who then bought common stocks would see their value drop to a third or a fourth of the purchase price in the next 24 months. The Coolidge bull market was a remarkable phenomenon. The ruthlessness of its liquidation was, in its own way, equally remarkable. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Agreeable as it is to know where one is proceeding, it is far more important to know where one has arrived. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Recurrent descent into insanity is not a wholly attractive feature of capitalism. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Agriculture is one economic activity that does not obey the laws of demand and supply. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

I am not quite sure what the advantage is in having a few more dollars to spend if the air is too dirty to breathe, the water too polluted to drink, the commuters are losing out in the struggle to get in and out of the city, the streets are filthy, and the schools so bad that the young perhaps wisely stay away, and the hoodlums roll citizens for some of the dollars they saved in the tax cut. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

One must always have in mind one simple fact - there is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

The Senate has unlimited debate; in the House, debate is ruthlessly circumscribed. There is frequent discussion as to which technique most effectively frustrates democratic process. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman. ~ George Stigler

When everything else failed, we can still become immortal by making an enormous blunder ... ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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

When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

I think the role of the Federal Reserve is enormously exaggerated. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

One of the best ways of avoiding necessary and even urgent tasks is to seem to be busily employed on things that are already done. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

In a community where public services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

One man's consumption becomes his neighbor's wish. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

While it will be desirable to achieve planned results, it will be even more important to avoid unplanned disasters. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Economic stimulation that works through the increased outlays to the affluent has, inevitably, an aspect of soundness and sanity that is lacking in expenditure on behalf of the undeserving poor. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

One of the many signs of verbal virtuosity among intellectuals is the repackaging of words to mean things that are not only different from, but sometimes the direct opposite of, their original meanings. 'Freedom' and 'power' are among the most common of these repackaged words. The basic concept of freedom as not being subjected to other people's restrictions, and of power as the ability to restrict other people's options have both been stood on their heads in some of the repackaging of these words by intellectuals discussing economic issues. Thus business enterprises who expand the public's options, either quantitatively (through lower prices) or qualitatively (through better products) are often spoken of as 'controlling' the market, whenever this results in a high percentage of consumers choosing to purchase their particular products rather than the competing products of other enterprises.

In other words, when consumers decide that particular brands of products are either cheaper or better than competing brands of those products, third parties take it upon themselves to depict those who produced these particular brands as having exercised 'power' or 'control.' If, at a given time, three-quarters of the consumers prefer to buy the Acme brand of widgets to any other brand, then Acme Inc. will be said to 'control' three-quarters of the market, even though consumers control 100 percent of the market, since they can switch to another brand of widgets tomorrow if someon ~ Thomas Sowell

You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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

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. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

In 1929 the discovery of the wonders of the geometric series struck Wall Street with a force comparable to the invention of the wheel. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Financial operations do not lend themselves to innovation. What is recurrently so described and celebrated is, without exception, a small variation on an established design ... The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Meetings are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium of solitary duties. They yearn for the prestige which accrues to the man who presides over meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblages over which they can preside. Finally, there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith