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Softpanorama
(slightly skeptical)
Open Source Software Educational Society |
May the
source be with you,
but remember the KISS principle ;-)
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Famous Quotes of John Kenneth Galbraith
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"Always tell the truth.
That way, you don't have to remember what you said."
Mark Twain
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John Kenneth Galbraith was probably the most famous as well as the tallest
economist of the second half of the 20th century. Brian W. Sloboda (U.S.
Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics) wrote
the following introduction to the Galbraith book The Affluent
Society:
John Kenneth Galbraith, one of America’s most prominent Keynesian
and institutionalist economists, died in April 2006. Galbraith
was a prolific author and scholar, and in his best-selling 1958 book,
The Affluent Society, Galbraith described the condition of
the United States after the Second World War. The motivation for this
review is to honor his achievements and influence on modern economic
thought. The motif of the Affluent Society was that
the US was rich in private resources but
poor in public ones because of a misplaced priority on increasing production
in the private sector. Galbraith argued that industrial
production was being devoted to satisfying trivial consumer needs, in
part to maintain employment. Consequently, he recommended, the United
States should shift resources from the private to the government sphere
in order to increase mobility, improve schools, infrastructure, recreational
resources, and social services as a means of providing a better quality
of life instead of creating an abundance of consumer goods to satisfy
mass consumption. Put succinctly, Galbraith believed that the
affluent society would be balanced because giant corporations would
control the markets while the unions would protect and provide job stability
to workers. The main role of government would then be to regulate business
cycles. The Affluent Society was one in a series of his
works which comprised of American Capitalism (1952), The
New Industrial State (1967), and Economics and the Public Purpose
(1972), which offered a theoretical justification for government
intervention and various proposals for implementing his ideas.
The Affluent Society asserts that classical economic theory
was more relevant in the years when poverty was more widespread.
Over time, America has moved from that state into an age of greater
affluence, and the standard, neoclassical economic theory seems to fall
short.
In the first part of the book, Galbraith discusses the influence
of Social Darwinism and Marxism on people during the 19th and early
20th centuries. In fact, he chronicles the evolution of economic thinking
starting with the early belief that the average worker would always
earn just enough to survive and perhaps raise a family. However, he
contends that the issue of inequality in the distribution of wealth
has drawn less attention over time. As America moved into the
20th century, Galbraith argued, production became a dominant theme in
economic thought since people no longer viewed economic inequality as
a major issue. Despite this paradigm shift from economic inequality
to production, Galbraith asserted that the emphasis on production was
irrational. More specifically, this new paradigm stressed
that the private sector was best equipped to meet society’s wants and
that the benefit from expanding government services was small.
Consumerism was a major theme in The Affluent Society.
Galbraith contends that with the steady increase in wages in the United
States, luxury items have become the new standard, replacing the basics
of food and shelter. Targeted advertising has been responsible for creating
both the increase in consumption and the purchase of more luxury goods.
He states that contemporary economic theory does not take into account
what he dubbed the ‘‘dependence effect” – i.e., that the ever-increasing
desire for additional consumption is in a sense “manufactured” by advertising
– of advertising and purchasing. Gailbraith contends that the
massive growth in consumption has resulted in the steady increase of
consumer debt from the 1920s to 1958. He
warned that the accumulation of consumer debt is harmful to the economy,
but the new paradigm believes that amassing consumer debt is acceptable
if it brings high rates of production and consumption.
Since the Second World War, Galbraith believes that the supply side
or the cost push element attributed to inflation, and more direct government
intervention was needed to keep inflation under control without reducing
employment. Economists during this time often disagreed on the
cause of inflation and the best policy to combat it. Galbraith
was influenced by Keynesian economics, especially in the application
of government policy. By initiating government spending at the
bottom of business cycles, policy-makers could stimulate the economy.
On the other hand, government tax policy could also be used reduce the
high excesses during periods of expansions as a means to reduce excess
consumption.
Galbraith further addresses the role of monetary policy as conducted
by the Federal Reserve System as a tool to control inflation.
He strongly believes that the Federal Reserve’s
method of raising interest rates does more to harm small businesses
than it protects the consumer against inflation. Thus,
contractionary monetary policy should be avoided. Galbraith contends
that Americans mistakenly place too much emphasis on production in the
private sector and often conclude that private sector production is
the most important measure of the economy’s strength; he adds that the
dominant thought places too little value on government services. As
he sees it, there should be a balance between private and public expenditures.
Because of this polarization, he coined
the term ‘‘social balance’’ to describe an acceptable relationship between
private and public expenditure. An affluent society is
dependent on public goods such as law enforcement, education, sanitation,
transportation, highways, and the transportation infrastructure. Galbraith
dedicated an entire chapter in The Affluent Society to discussing
the underinvestment in public education. Public education, he suggested,
is a public expenditure that really represents an investment
because it provides an educated and trained labor force for the private
sector. Society, however, seems unable to recognize that public
education is a worthwhile investment for promoting economic prosperity.
Galbraith discussed the importance of investment in individuals, which
is a precursor of the concept of human capital as espoused by Schultz
(1961) and Becker (1962).
Galbraith placed a greater emphasis on sales taxes than income taxes
because it achieves an improved social balance between private and public
sector production. That is, increasing
sales taxes would reduce consumption of goods and make those who consume
pay more in taxes. This increase in sales taxes
would provide greater funds at the state level, which would in turn
allow government to provide the necessary public services such as education,
health, and human service programs. He also advocated greater government
spending as the most effective approach for reducing poverty.
The Affluent Society sparked a serious intellectual debate
with its publication in 1958, and many of the themes are still relevant
in today. In recent years, the national economy’s showing has
been impressive: 4.7 percent unemployment rate, 5.3 percent growth
of GDP, increases in productivity as well as improvements in other economic
indicators. However, opinion polls have indicated that people
are not satisfied with economic conditions, despite the positive statistics.
These data indicate that people are amassing wealth and consuming goods,
two effects that can lead to greater happiness and an improved quality
of life. Increased happiness, however, is not flow from the growth
of luxury goods and disposable income.
Each successive generation has faced somewhat different economic
issues, driven by different circumstances. For the current generation,
rapid advances in technology, economic globalization, the need for coexistence
with rogue nations, corporate malfeasance of companies like Enron, and
other events affect today’s economy. For some policymakers and
intellectuals, the underlying themes of The Affluent Society
could be applicable to the contemporary debate about how to improve
the quality of life for all. In brief, the feeling that corporations
were not always the most noble of institutions and a deepening dichotomy
between the wealthy and less wealthy form the core beliefs of Galbraith
and are still relevant today.
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."
Quote of the day
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
Quote of the day
“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, A Short History of Financial
Euphoria
Quote of the day
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 those who do not have the insight to appreciate
the incredible wonders of the present." -John Kenneth Galbraith
- Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
- If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular
error.
- It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense
than to put out on the troubled sea of thought.
- Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
- Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
- Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing
between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
- Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the
opposite.
- 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.
- You will find that the State is the kind of organization which,
though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
- There is nothing that unfettered chief executives will not do to
feather their own nests.
- "Some things were never meant
to be recycled.'" John Kenneth Galbraith bumper sticker
with a picture of George Bush.
Creativity
- One of the greatest pieces of economic
wisdom is to know what you do not know. "In ""The Speaker's Electronic
Reference Collection,"" AApex Software, 1994."
- It is almost as important to know
what is not serious as to know what is. "In ""The Speaker's Electronic
Reference Collection,"" AApex Software, 1994."
- "Inventions that are not made, like
babies that are not born, are not missed." """The Affluent Society,""
1958."
- "Originality is something that
is easily exaggerated, especially by authors contemplating their own
work."
"In ""Webster's Electronic Quotebase,"" ed. Keith Mohler, 1994."
- "If all else fails, immortality can
always be assured by spectacular error." "Money: Whence it Came,
Where it Went."
- Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the
opposite.
- There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and
lose.
-
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing
between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
-
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
-
"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."
- Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
- You will find that the State is the kind of organization which,
though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
- "Some things were never meant to be recycled.'" John Kenneth
Galbraith bumper sticker with a picture of George Bush.
- Foreign policy is conducted for the convenience
and enjoyment of people in Washington.
- 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.
- 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
- 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. However, 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. 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.
- 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.
- The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job
of thinking.
- The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march
of events.
- There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed
by truth.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is
the world of Richard Nixon.
— Adlai Stevenson speech in Los Angeles, 1956, written by John Kenneth
Galbraith
- Hitler also anticipated modern economic policy . . . by recognizing
that a rapid approach to full employment was only possible if it was
combined with wage and price controls. That a nation oppressed by economic
fear would respond to Hitler as Americans did to F.D.R. is not surprising.
-
[4] Quoted from John Toland: Adolf Hitler: The Definitive
Biography. New York 1991, Anchor Publishing.
- Technology, under all circumstances, leads to planning; in its higher
manifestations it may put the problems of planning beyond the reach
of the industrial firm. Technological compulsions, and not ideology
or political will, will require the firm to seek the help and protection
of the state. – The new industrial state, p38
- Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the
aspect of intelligence.
- Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary,
although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
- 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.
- "People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction
rather than surrender any material part of their advantage."
- People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to
what makes them so happy.
- Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important
to those who have it and those who do not.
- 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.
- Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.
- 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.
- The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building
values of the privation of the poor.
- 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.
- “Milton’s [Friedman’s] misfortune is that his policies have been
tried.”
- Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
- "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology
look respectable."
- Economists forecast 'not because they know, but because they are
asked'.
- On market crashes "inaction will be advocated in the present
even though it means deep trouble in the future."
- In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension
and also a deep desire for respectability.
- In economics, the majority is always wrong.
- One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you
do not know.
- "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."
- Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain.
Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
- 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.
- Agriculture is one economic activity that does
not obey the laws of demand and supply
- “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.”
- "It is a well known and very important fact that America's founding
fathers did not like taxation without representation. It is a lesser
known and equally important fact that they did not much like taxation
with representation." (From "Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went")
- The decisive weakness in neoclassical and neo-Keynesian economics
is not the error in the assumptions by which it elides the problem of
power. The capacity for erroneous belief is very great, especially where
it coincides with convenience. Rather, in eliding power — in making
economics a nonpolitical subject — neoclassical theory destroys its
relation to the real world. In that world, power is decisive in what
happens. And the problems of that world are increasing both in number
and in the depth of their social affliction. In consequence, neoclassical
and neo-Keynesian economics is relegating its players to the social
sidelines where they either call no plays or use the wrong ones. To
change the metaphor, they manipulate levers to which no machinery is
attached. Power and the Useful Economist" (1973) (printed in Annals
of an Abiding Liberal and The Essential Galbraith)
- The decisive weakness in neoclassical and neo-Keynesian economics
is not the error in the assumptions by which it elides the problem of
power. The capacity for erroneous belief is very great, especially where
it coincides with convenience. Rather, in eliding power — in making
economics a nonpolitical subject — neoclassical theory destroys its
relation to the real world. In that world, power is decisive in what
happens. And the problems of that world are increasing both in number
and in the depth of their social affliction. In consequence, neoclassical
and neo-Keynesian economics is relegating its players to the social
sidelines where they either call no plays or use the wrong ones. To
change the metaphor, they manipulate levers to which no machinery is
attached.
- Almost 60-odd years ago in Canada. I was studying agriculture, how
to produce better chickens, better cattle, better horses — horses in
those days — better fruit, better vegetables. This was in the early
years of the Great Depression, and the thoughts crossed my mind that
there wasn't a hell of a lot of use producing better crops and better
livestock if you couldn't sell them, that the real problem of agriculture
was not efficiency in production but the problem of whether you could
make money after you produced the stuff. So I shifted from the technical
side to, first, the study of agricultural economic issues and then on
to economics itself.
- Interview with Brian Lamb, Booknotes, C-SPAN (1994-11-13)
[3]
-
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. – The new industrial state, p386
- 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 those who do not have the insight to appreciate
the incredible wonders of the present." -John Kenneth Galbraith
- There is nothing that unfettered chief executives will not do to
feather their own nests.
- Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
- 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.
- In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with
the majority than to be right alone.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
-
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.
- 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.'
- Professor Galbraith felt many conflicts were essentially a "recreational"
activity of the professional military, bored by a long peace. "It [war]
also helps employment."
- A nuclear war does not defend a country and it does not defend a
system. I've put it the same way many times; not even the most accomplished
ideologue will be able to tell the difference between the ashes of capitalism
and the ashes of communism.
- Get the process of negotiation away from the small specialized group
that some people have called the "nuclear theologians," who in effect
said this is a complicated issue of seeing how little we can give away,
how much we can extract from the other side; it's highly specialized.
Only a few people can understand the nature of these weapons, the delivery
systems, the targeting, the nature of the MIRV and the CRUISE, on down,
and the MX. This kept the whole discussion to a very limited group of
people who, in a way, had assumed responsibility for saying whether
we should live or die.
- "The Ashes of Capitalism and the Ashes of Communism," interview
(undated) with John M. Whiteley in Quest for Peace: an Introduction
(1986), ed. John Whiteley
- The truth is not the average of right and wrong.
- "Inventive journalism is a great danger to mankind"
- It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense
than to put out on the troubled seas of thought. The Affluent Society
(1958), ch. 11
- There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody
who is worth a billion dollars.
- 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.
- Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
- Interview with Lorie Conway (1997) from Interviews with John
Kenneth Galbraith (2004) ed. James Ronald Stanfield and Jacqueline
Bloom Stanfield. Conway saw these words on a framed needlepoint,
entitled "Galbraith's First Law," at Galbraith's home
- "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."
- "Humility is not always compatible with truth."
- "It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense
than to put out on the troubled sea of thought."
- "If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular
error."
- Originality is something that is easily exaggerated, especially
by authors contemplating their own work.
- 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.
- 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.
- Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
- We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.
- 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.
- 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"
-
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.
- If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular
error.
- It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense
than to put out on the troubled sea of thought.
- 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.
- "It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense
than to put out on the troubled sea of thought"
- "If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular
error"
- Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are
not missed.
- It is almost as important to know what is not serious as to know
what is.
- 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.
- By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that
this is not the age of the small man.
- 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.
- In the choice between changing one's mind and proving there's no
need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.
- 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.
- 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.
- It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian
of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.
- 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.
- The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce.
- There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely
is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
- There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody
who is worth a billion dollars.
- 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.
-
The critics were asking that we postpone consideration of the causes
of poverty until no one was poor.
- "I remember seeing these great long legs wedged up against the seat
in front of him, and there was Ken writing his next book. I said, 'Don't
you find these international flights exhausting?' He turned to me and
said, 'McGovern, it beats farming!'"
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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.
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