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
father america important
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.
men people dynamics
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.
running wall mirrors
The stock market is but a mirror which provides an image of the underlying or fundamental economic situation. Cause and effect run from the economy to the stock market, never the reverse. In 1929 the economy was headed for trouble. Eventually that trouble was violently reflected in Wall Street.
successful men ideas
There are a significant number of learned men and women who hold that any successful effort to make ideas lively, intelligible and interesting is a manifestation of deficient scholarship. This is the fortress behind which the minimally coherent regularly find refuge.
people foolish secure
Only foolish people are completely secure.
expression voice people
It was not hard to persuade people that the market was sound; as always in such times they asked only that the dispiriting voices of doubt be muted and that there should be tolerably frequent expressions of confidence. Just a month before the crash, Irving Fisher was saying: "There may be a recession in stock prices, but not anything in the nature of a crash".
months detroit taught
I was brought up in southwestern Ontario where we were taught that Canadian patriotism should not withstand anything more than a five-dollar-a-month wage differential. Anything more than that and you went to Detroit.
vietnam world would-be
If we were not in Vietnam, all that part of the world would be enjoying the obscurity it so richly deserves.
education degrees arthur
My rule on honorary degrees has always been to have one more than Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
reality men littles
The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great -- a little understood thing.
taken decision virtue
Decision has greater virtue and force if taken after there has been eloquent dissent.
mastery levels may
The oldest problem in economic education is how to exclude the incompetent. A certain glib mastery of verbiage-the ability to speak portentously and sententiously about the relation of money supply to the price level-is easy for the unlearned and may even be aided by a mildly enfeebled intellect. The requirement that there be ability to master difficult models, including ones for which mathematical competence is required, is a highly useful screening device.
running lying mean
Financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long-run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with Communism, lies the threat to Capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound.
loyalty military reality
And there was a deeper, less visible effect of the Truman loyalty program. Seeing its consequences for certain individuals and fearing its intrusion on their own lives, many in the government sought protection by strongly asserting their anti-Communism. In the public action that ensued, policy was based not on reality but, instinctively or deliberately, on personal caution...Those who urged a militant and sometimes military anti-Communism were considered sound, trustworthy and personally safe; those who questioned such a course were politically unsafe, possible even slightly disloyal.