John Kenneth Galbraith > Quotes

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

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“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.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive. ”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society

“I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.
”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to "trickle down" economics).”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“The complaints of the privileged are too often confused with the voice of the masses.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“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.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

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

“But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty

“Under capitalism, man exploits man; while under socialism just the reverse is true.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times

“The family which takes its mauve an cerise, air-conditioned, power-steered and power-braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, lighted buildings, billboards and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground. They pass on into countryside that has been rendered largely invisible by commercial art. (The goods which the latter advertise have an absolute priority in our value system. Such aesthetic considerations as a view of the countryside accordingly come second. On such matters we are consistent.) They picnic on exquisitely packaged food from a portable icebox by a polluted stream and go on to spend the night at a park which is a menace to public health and morals. Just before dozing off on an air mattress, beneath a nylon tent, amid the stench of decaying refuse, they may reflect vaguely on the curious unevenness of their blessings. Is this, indeed, the American genius?”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action of the machine we have created to serve us.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty

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

“The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929

“More die in the United States of too much food than of too little”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

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

“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.”
― 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 Age of Uncertainty

“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.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“The shortcomings of economics are not original error but uncorrected obsolescence. The obsolescence has occurred because what is convenient has become sacrosanct. Anyone who attacks such ideas must seem to be a trifle self-confident and even aggressive. The man who makes his entry by leaning against an infirm door gets an unjustified reputation for violence. Something is to be attributed to the poor state of the door.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society

“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, Economics, Peace and Laughter

“Wisdom... is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929

“Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“War remains the decisive human failure.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.”
― 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

“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.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“The process by which money is created is so simple that the mind is repelled.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“Then the shit hit the fan.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times

“Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty

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

“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 to a universal trust turned into something akin to universal suspicion. Audits were ordered. Strained or preoccupied behavior was noticed. Most important, the collapse in stock values made irredeemable the position of the employee who had embezzled to play the market. He now confessed.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929

“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, Economics, Peace and Laughter

“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.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics, Peace and Laughter

“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, Economics, Peace and Laughter

“The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is
not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth.
Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great -- a little understood
thing.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“Aunque todo lo demás falle, siempre podemos asegurarnos la inmortalidad cometiendo algún error espectacular.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith