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
In the choice between changing one's mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. With something so important, a deeper mystery seems only decent.
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
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.
It is a commonplace of modern technology that problems have solutions before there is knowledge of how they are to be solved.
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.
It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
In recent times no problem has been more puzzling to thoughtful people than why, in a troubled world, we make such poor use of our affluence.
It takes a certain brashness to attack the accepted economic legendsbut noneat all toperpetuatethem. So theyare perpetuated.
In economics, unlike fiction and the theater, there is no harm in a premature disclosure of the plot: it is to see the changes just mentioned and others as an interlocked whole.
In the world of minor lunacy the behaviour of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd.