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 conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
In economics, the majority is always wrong.
Poverty" Pitt exclaimed "is no disgrace but it is damned annoying." In the contemporary United States it is not annoying but it is a disgrace.
To see economic policy as a problem of choice between rival ideologies is the greatest error of our time.
It is a commonplace of modern technology that problems have solutions before there is knowledge of how they are to be solved.
Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
The years of the Great Depression were a superb time for economists because people not knowing what could be done or what should be done would always assume that maybe an economist had the answer. If you were just a lawyer in Washington, you were nobody. But if you were an economist, you might have the answer.
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.
The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce.
We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.
There's no question that in my lifetime, the contrast between what I called private affluence and public squalor has become very much greater.
Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.