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Famous Quotes of John Kenneth Galbraith

Galbraith's greatest appeal as an economist and a writer is the disdain he holds the economists as a profession. He was a merciless critic of  ignorance and the status-quo... Galbraith is funny and deep simultaneously in best Mark Twain's tradition. You can learn a lot from him, he makes you see under the surface of things. And he obviously was a great economist.

Amartya Sen said the influence of John Kenneth Galbraith's book The Affluent Society is so pervasive as to be taken for granted: "It's like reading Hamlet and deciding it's full of quotations."

Politics

1. Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
    
2. There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
    

3. Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
    

4. I react to what is necessary. I would like to eschew any formula. There are some things where the government is absolutely inevitable, which we cannot get along without comprehensive state action. But there are many things -- producing consumer goods, producing a wide range of entertainment, producing a wide level of cultural activity — where the market system, which independent activity is also important, so I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I'm for that. Where the government is necessary, I'm for that. I'm deeply suspicious of somebody who says, "I'm in favor of privatization," or, "I'm deeply in favor of public ownership." I'm in favor of whatever works in the particular case. — John Kenneth Galbraith, interview with Brian Lamb, November 13, 1994
    

5. "One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read."
    

6. Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
    
7. You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
    
8.  "Some things were never meant to be recycled.'" John Kenneth Galbraith bumper sticker with a picture of George Bush.
    
9. Foreign policy is conducted for the convenience and enjoyment of people in Washington.
    
10. 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.
     
11. All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum. — John Kenneth Galbraith
     
12. An 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. Superficial observers have long criticized the United States for making a fetish of youth. This is unfair. Uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration, its national legislature rewards senility.
     
13. In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated. If the world is lucky enough to enjoy peace, it may even one day make the discovery, to the horror of doctrinaire free-enterprisers and doctrinaire planners alike, that what is called capitalism and what is called socialism are both capable of working quite well.
     
14. The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
     
15. The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
     
16. There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.
     
17. When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.
     
18. 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.
     
19. Going back to the most ancient times, national well-being, the national prestige depended on territory. The more territory a country had, the more income revenue there was, the more people there were to be mobilized for arms strength. So we had an enormous sense of territorial conflict and territorial integrity, and that was unquestionably a part of the cause of war, coupled with the fact that there was a disposition in that direction by the landed class, a disposition to think of territorial acquisition and territorial defense and to think of the peasantry as a superior form of livestock which could be used for arms purposes.
    
    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.
     
20. There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.
     
21. You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon.
    — Adlai Stevenson speech in Los Angeles, 1956, writen by John Kenneth Galbraith
     

Wealth and power

1. Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
    
2. Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
    
3. The huge capacity to purchase submission that goes with any large sum of money, well, this we have. This is a power of which we should all be aware.
    
4. "People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage."
    
5. People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
    
6. Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.
    
7. 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.
    
8. Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.
    
9. 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.
    
10. The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
     
11. The traveler to the United States will do well to prepare himself for the class-consciousness of the natives. This differs from the already familiar English version in being more extreme and based more firmly on the conviction that the class to which the speaker belongs is inherently superior to all others.

Economics

1. Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
    
2. "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."
    
3. Economists forecast 'not because they know, but because they are asked'.
    
4. On market crashes  "inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future."
    
5. In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
    
6. In economics, the majority is always wrong.
    
7. One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
    
8. "The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise the truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it."
    
9. Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
    
10. 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.
     
11. Agriculture is one economic activity that does not obey the laws of demand and supply

Corporations and Capitalism

1. The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.
    
2. 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.
    
3. The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.
    
4. Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
    
5. Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
    
6. There is nothing that unfettered chief executives will not do to feather their own nests.
    
7. In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
    
8. Any consideration of the life and larger social existence of the modern corporate man begins and also largely ends with the effect of one all-embracing force. That is organization — the highly structured assemblage of men, and now some women, of which he is a part. It is to this, at the expense of family, friends, sex, recreation and sometimes health and effective control of alcoholic intake, that he is expected to devote his energies.
    
9. There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.
    
10. 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, "Free Market Fraud," Progressive Magazine article, January, 1999
     
11. There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.

Military

1. During the course of the conversation, a senator asked Dr Radhakrishnan about the rumour then floating in Delhi that General B M Kaul, the architect of the 1962 military disaster, had been captured by the Chinese. Professor Galbraith, with obvious glee, recalled the Indian President's deadpan reply: 'Unfortunately, it is not true.'
    
2. Professor Galbraith felt many conflicts were essentially a "recreational" activity of the professional military, bored by a long peace. "It [war] also helps employment."

Press

1. "Inventive journalism is a great danger to mankind"

Academics

1. "One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read."
2. "Humility is not always compatible with truth."
3. "It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled sea of thought."
4. "If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error."
5. Originality is something that is easily exaggerated, especially by authors contemplating their own work.
6. Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.
7. 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.
8. Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
9. We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.
10. Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.
11. Eisenhower had suggested Professor Milton Friedman, the guru of free markets. Professor Galbraith laughingly recalled his response to that: "That would be like asking the Pope for consultancy on birth control!"

Etc

1. Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.

2. If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
3. It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled sea of thought.
4. Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.
5. "It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled sea of thought"
6. "If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error"
7. Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are not missed.
8. It is almost as important to know what is not serious as to know what is.
9. Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong.
10. By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.
11. 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.
12. In the choice between changing one's mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.
13. In the first place I identify this [continuing poverty] with primitive agriculture, and two factors have been at work there. One is, of course, population growth. If you were a poor farmer in India, Pakistan, or in much of Africa, you would want as many sons as possible as your social security. They would keep you out of the hot sun and give you some form of subsistence in your old age. So, you have pressure for population growth that is, itself, the result of the extreme economic insecurity. This is something which hasn't been sufficiently emphasized.
14. Increasingly in recent times we have come first to identify the remedy that is most agreeable, most convenient, most in accord with major pecuniary or political interest, the one that reflects our available faculty for action; then we move from the remedy so available or desired back to a cause to which that remedy is relevant.
15. It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.
16. The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations. But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.
17. The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce.
18. There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
19. There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.
20. Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.
21. The critics were asking that we postpone consideration of the causes of poverty until no one was poor.

    Recommended Links

    John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes - The Quotations Page

    Material Facts Quotes - John Kenneth Galbraith

    book review galbraith the essential galbraith

    One doubtless unintended consequence of the Cold War was the furious intensification of a tendency to cast competing schools of economic thought as virtual faiths; quasi-religious dogma battling for the monetary soul of the world while real religion waned. Notwithstanding the corroding and eventual downfall of Marxism, the differing sects of liberal capitalism would informally come to blows on the editorial pages of newspapers and in fixed bouts (pun intended) known popularly as federal elections. It took the sobering events of September 11th to remind us of the continued relevance and profound, historical volatility of real religion.

    In the economy wars of the previous half-century, the (Ontario-born but essentially American) economist John Kenneth Galbraith cut a figure equal parts Savonarola and Swift. To fiscal conservatives, Libertarians, and the fundamentalist fringe in places like the John Birch Society, Galbraith was definitely the former. But it's hard to reconcile their image of him - a mad Keynesian socialist championing big government and punitive taxation against business and the market - with the patrician Harvard professor who began his career in FDR's wartime Wage and Price Control Office.

    Reading The Essential Galbraith, a new anthology that surveys his career, one tends to encounter the Swiftian Galbraith, a dry and decidedly unhysterical thinker armed with reserves of desiccating sarcasm. Occasionally, as in "The Unfinished Business of the Century", the lecture that closes the book, one finds the moralist behind the imperturbable facade, the Galbraith responsible for books like The Culture of Contentment and The Good Society. This would also be the Galbraith that, alone among the bright young men sent by Washington to interrogate Nazi armaments minister Albert Speer before the Nuremberg Trials, regarded the astutely contrite war criminal with barely concealed disgust. Speer might have miraculously increased production under withering Allied bombardment, but Galbraith still saw a man who performed this miracle through ruthless use of slave labour.

    This moral Galbraith has been the one best served by the editing of this compilation. In the early chapters, which draw from the meat of his economic writing, Galbraith makes a strong case for the inadequacy of poorly-divined market forces at addressing the basic needs of society. In "The Nature of Social Balance", from 1958's widely-read The Affluent Society, Galbraith describes the dilemma of states and municipalities that, unable to underwrite their own loans and at the mercy of transfer payments from federal authorities who can, begin starving their citizens of decent public services out of a morbid, politically-induced fear of taxation. To those familiar with the abusive tango between Ontario and Toronto for the past half-decade or so, it's a chilling passage.

    Perhaps his greatest gift to modern vocabulary is the term "conventional wisdom", an idea that Galbraith regards as essential when dealing with economists and those professing fiscal wisdom. In politics, and even (perhaps especially) business, where authorities are often poorly apprised of the positions they regard as gospel, the concept of conventional wisdom is a guiding light: "An understanding of our economic discourse requires an appreciation of one of its basic rules: men of high position are allowed, by a special act of grace, to accommodate their reasoning to the answer they need. Logic is only required in those of lesser rank."

    In his essays on Adam Smith, Marx and Keynes, Galbraith acknowledges the sad truths that render economics "the dismal science": the fact of constant change in social and economic circumstance, the seductiveness of conventional wisdom, and the difficulty in reading both accurate statistics and the future clearly. It's perhaps because of this that Galbraith's reputation is stronger as a historian and popular essayist than as an economist. It was his caustic but confiding wit - along with some fantastic visuals - that drove the 1977 t.v. series "The Age of Uncertainty", a PBS/BBC/CBC co-production that greatly impressed me, even as a twelve-year old boy.

    Despite the much-heralded "triumph of the market", there's remarkable choice, but little depth, in the panoply of books and magazines on business, management, money, investment and economy today. Alone among Galbraith's younger contemporaries, Princeton's Paul Krugman offers a broad, skeptical perspective on the world of money. Yet, in his book Peddling Prosperity, Krugman feels obliged to point out that Galbraith was never able to author an economic treatise as influential as Keynes or Milton Friedman. Even John F. Kennedy, while employing numerous academic economists in his administration, saw fit only to make Galbraith ambassador to India, a post Galbraith recalls as "an often undemanding occupation".

    A few years ago, Krugman wrote a pollyanna-ish piece on Enron for Fortune magazine, doubtless under the influence of the bright "new economy" moment that seemed so promising before the Nasdaq crash - that, and the $50,000 fee that Enron paid him for a bit of consulting. It's come back to bite him now, of course, but it illustrates how "dismal scientists" can become a bit more optimistic under the influence of "market forces" that aren't often discussed in economic theory. Doubtless The Essential Galbraith has been edited to excise similar failures of prognostication.

    This does not, however, diminish the pleasures of the best of Galbraith's writing. One essay, "The Proper Purpose of Economic Development", might be useful reading for opponents on both sides of the recent, enraged protests over globalization. If any recent economic skirmish has been so freighted with conventional wisdoms, long past any ability to discern priorities or truth, it has doubtless invoked globalization, that dismal palimpsest of fear and hopeless jargon.

Last modified: February 28, 2008