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.
Why is anything intrinsically so valueless so obviously desirable?
The seminar in economic theory conducted by Hayek at the L.S.E. in the 1930s was attended, it came to seem, by all of the economists of my generation - Nicky Kaldor , Thomas Balogh, L. K. Jah, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, the list could be indefinitely extended. The urge to participate (and correct Hayek) was ruthlessly competitive.
Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.
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.