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
The privileged have regularly invited their own destruction with their greed.
It takes some skill to spoil a breakfast - even the English can't do it.
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.
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's much easier to point out the problem than it is to say just how it should be solved.
If you get a reputation for being honest, you have 95 percent of the competition already beat.
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.
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 the those who do not have insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.
It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.
There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations.
The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil.
Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried.
There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.
In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.