John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 – 2006)
Canadian-American economist and author.
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 size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning.
All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.
That one never need to look beyond the love of money for explanation of human behavior is one of the most jealously guarded simplification of our culture.
The greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt.
People are the common denominator of progress. So, paucis verbis, no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills, and the other familiar furniture of economic development. At some stages of development — the stage that India and Pakistan have reached, for example — they are central to the strategy of development. But we are coming to realize, I think, that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.
Hitler also anticipated modern economic policy . . . by recognizing that a rapid approach to full employment was only possible if it was combined with wage and price controls. That a nation oppressed by economic fear would respond to Hitler as Americans did to F.D.R. is not surprising.
Seaboard Air Line, which was thought by numerous innocents to provide a foothold in aviation, was another favorite, although, in fact, it was a railroad.
Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
While it will be desirable to achieve planned results, it will be even more important to avoid unplanned disasters.
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.
The massive reduction in risk that is inherent in the development of the modern corporation has been far from fully appreciated.
Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study.
THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM requires that prices be under effective control. And it seeks the greatest possible influence over what buyers take at the established prices.
In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.
No one was responsible for the great Wall Street crash. No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of free choice and decision of hundreds of thousands of individuals.
Who is king in the world of the blind when there isn't even a one eyed man?
In 1736, Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette printed an apology for its irregular appearence because its printer was "with the Press, labouring for the publick Good, to make Money more plentiful." The press was busy printing money.
Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.
Those who yearn for the end of capitalism should pray for government by men who believe that all positive action is inimical to what they call thoughtfully the fundamental principles of free enterprise.