John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 – 2006)
Canadian-American economist and author.
There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.
It's a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction.
Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.
SOME YEARS, like some poets,and politicians and some lovely women, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot, and 1929 was clearly such a year.
Meetings are a great trap. ... they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
You will find that [the] State [Department] is the kind of organisation which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly too.
Even the word depression itself was the terminological product of an effort to soften the connotation of deep trouble. In the last century, the term crisis was normally employed. With time, however, this acquired the connotation of the misfortune it described.
Only men of considerable vanity write books; consistently therewith, I worried lest the world were exchanging an irreplaceable author for a more easily purchased diplomat.
It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.
The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is the one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.
The myth that holds that the great corporation is the puppet of the market, the powerless servant of the consumer, is, in fact one of the devices by which its power is perpetuated.
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.
Why is anything intrinsically so valueless so obviously desirable?
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.
The foresight of financial experts was, as so often, a poor guide to the future.
The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.
Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego. It is well no doubt, to reflect on how much one owes to others.
Then the shit hit the fan.
When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.