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
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
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.
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 numerous years following the war, the Federal Government ran a heavy surplus. It could not (however) pay off its debt, retire its securities, because to do so meant there would be no bonds to back the national bank notes. To pay off the debt was to destroy the money supply.
Conscience is better served by a myth.
Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.
I react to what is necessary. I would like to eschew any formula.
We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.
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.
However, it is safe to say that at the peak in 1929 the number of active speculators was less - and probably was much less - than a million.
In a world where for pedagogic and other purposes a very large number of economists is required, an arrangement which discourages many of them from
Economics exists to make astrology look respectable.
Broadly speaking, Keynesianism means that the government has a specific responsibility for the behavior of the economy, that it doesn't work on its own autonomous course, but the government, when there's a recession, compensates by employment, by expansion of purchasing power, and in boom times corrects by being a restraining force. But it controls the great flow of demand into the economy, what since Keynesian times has been the flow of aggregate demand. That was the basic idea of Keynes so far as one can put it in a couple of sentences.