John Kenneth Galbraith
John Kenneth Galbraith
John Kenneth "Ken" Galbraith, OCwas a Canadianeconomist, public official, and diplomat, and a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s, during which time Galbraith fulfilled the role of public intellectual. As an economist, he leaned toward Post-Keynesian economics from an institutionalist perspective...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth15 October 1908
CountryUnited States of America
John Kenneth Galbraith quotes about
wisdom knowledge mean
Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks.
work work-ethic ethics
No ethic is as ethical as the work ethic.
money people tasks
If anything is evident about people who manage money, it is that the task attracts a very low level of talent, one that is protected in its highly imperfect profession by the mystery that is thought to enfold the subject of economics in general and of money in particular.
class united-states consciousness
The traveler to the United States will do wellto 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.
men wish done
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.
understanding lovely age
Of late I have searched diligently to discover the advantages of age, and there is, I have concluded, only one. It is that lovely women treat your approaches with understanding rather than with disdain.
men people effort
Over the span of man's history, although a phenomenal amount of education, persuasion, indoctrination and incantation have been devoted to the effort, ordinary people have never been quite persuaded that toil is as agreeable as its alternatives. Thus to take increased well-being partly in the form of more goods and partly in the form of more leisure is unquestionably rational.
men class competition
Complexity and obscurity have professional value - they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.
fashion mean debt
All crises have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment.
believe people world
This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.
war faces nuclear
Both we and the Soviets face the common threat of nuclear destruction and there is no likelihood that either capitalism or communism will survive a nuclear war.
responsibility people nuclear
Get the process of negotiation away from the small specialized group that some people have called the "nuclear theologians" ... Only a few people can understand the nature of these weapons ... 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.
submission capacity should
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.
nice philosophical missing
No nice philosophical point has ever been so decisively resolved as this: that those who are not conceived do not miss the pleasure of consuming the goods they do not get born to enjoy.