John Kenneth Galbraith
A more important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality.Collection: Democracy
Complexity and obscurity have professional value - they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.Collection: Men
The shortcomings of economics are not original error but uncorrected obsolescence. The obsolescence has occurred because what is convenient has become sacrosanct. Anyone who attacks such ideas must seem to be a trifle self-confident and even aggressive. The man who makes his entry by leaning against an infirm door gets an unjustified reputation for violence. Something is to be attributed to the poor state of the door.Collection: Men
At best, in such depression times, monetary policy is a feeble reed on which to lean.Collection: Reeds
Anyone who says he won't resign four times, will.Collection: Political
I would put primary emphasis on a good standard of living equitably distributed. It can't be equal, but one that eliminates the terrible cruelty of poverty.Collection: Poverty
Money is what fueled the industrial society. But in the informational society, the fuel, the power, is knowledge. One has now come to see a new class structure divided by those who have information and those who must function out of ignorance. This new class has its power not from money, not from land, but from knowledge.Collection: Ignorance
Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.Collection: Past
No politician can praise unemployment or inflation, and there is no way of combining high employment with stable prices that does not involve some control of income and prices. Otherwise the struggle for more consumption and more income to sustain it-a struggle that modern corporations, modern unions and modern democracy all facilitate and encourage-will drive up prices. Only heavy unemployment will then temper this upward thrust. Not many wish to confront the truth that the modern economy gives a choice only between inflation, unemployment, or controls.Collection: Struggle
It is possible that people need to believe they are unmanaged if they are to be managed effectively.Collection: Believe
Few economic problems, if any, are difficult of solution. The difficulty, all but invariably, is in confronting them. We know what needs to be done; for reasons of inertia, pecuniary interest, passion or ignorance, we do not wish to say so.Collection: Ignorance
Financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long-run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with Communism, lies the threat to Capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound.Collection: Running
In Europe and the United States the two decades following the Second World War will for long be remembered as a very good time, the time when capitalism really worked. Everywhere in the industrialized countries production increased. Unemployment was everywhere low. Prices were nearly stable. When production lagged and unemployment rose, governments intervened to take up the slack, as Keynes had urged.Collection: Country
Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.Collection: Hero
Of all the mysteries of the stock exchange there is none so impenetrable as why there should be a buyer for everyone who seeks to sell.Collection: Mystery
The modern corporation must manufacture not only goods but the desire for the goods it manufactures.Collection: Business
A good rule of conversation is never answer a foolish question.Collection: Answers
Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed.Collection: Baby
Inflation does not lubricate trade but by rescuing traders from their errors of optimism or stupidity.Collection: Errors
Perhaps never before or since have so many people taken the measure of economic prospects and found them so favorable as in the two days following the Thursday [24th October 1929] disaster.Collection: Taken
Clerks in downtown hotels were said to be asking guests whether they wished the room for sleeping or jumping. Two men jumped hand-in-hand from a high window in the Ritz. They had a joint account.Collection: Sleep
Writing is a long and lonesome business; back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?Collection: Writing
If it is dangerous to suppose that government is always right, it will sooner or later be awkward for public administration if most people suppose that it is always wrong.Collection: Government
What is called a high standard of living consists, in considerable measure, in arrangements for avoiding muscular energy, for increasing sensual pleasure and enhancing caloric intake above any conceivable nutritional requirement.Collection: Success
Those days [of the Vietnam War] you couldn't get on a bus going to the South without expecting a riot over something or the other. All of that has disappeared thanks to Lyndon Johnson.Collection: War
The oldest [John Kenneth] Galbraith rule is that when you hear that a new era has dawned, you should take cover.Collection: Eras
We have a swarm of people in the stock market - not out of knowledge, not out of expectation, but out of basically a gambling instinct, the hope that prices will go up.Collection: Gambling
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and J.F Kennedy were Presidents in very different times.Collection: President
[Franklin Delano] Roosevelt was the central world figure in the two great disasters of this century - the Great Depression and World War II. By contrast, JFK came in relatively peaceful, agreeable times.Collection: War
A very complicated mass of things influences the economy - the speculative effect, government policy, consumer borrowing and spending, the level of technical innovation (which I concede, although everyone emphasizes it too much), and much more - including, of course, the rate of inflation.Collection: Government
I've become accustomed to supporting politicians who are more conservative than I am. This is not entirely a surprise.Collection: Conservative
I'm certainly going to support Al Gore because, on the whole, he's the more sensible figure and you vote not for the perfect but for the best. Coupled with that is a special situation.Collection: Perfect
Ralph [ Nader] is an old friend of mine, and he does a useful job in displaying a position.Collection: Jobs
I've been a faithful reader of the great classical documents of economics, or tried to be.Collection: Faithful
We're all subject to the daily pressures of consumer persuasion.Collection: Pressure
I accept the global complex and global trade more than do some of my liberal colleagues because I consider this a wise alternative to national tension and conflict.Collection: Wise
The power of the corporate bureaucracy - the power of technostructure (a term that did not take off) - is something to which I still adhere.Collection: Bureaucracy
I talked about the consolidation of power in the hands of the corporate bureaucracy, as distinct from the stockholders. To this view, I still strongly adhere.Collection: Views
The years of the Great Depression were a superb time for economists because people not knowing what could be done or what should be done would always assume that maybe an economist had the answer. If you were just a lawyer in Washington, you were nobody. But if you were an economist, you might have the answer.Collection: Years
The inborn instability of capitalism has been part of the history of the system for several hundred years.Collection: Years
I am for a close global association in trade and financial matters, rather than the opposite possibility of excessive nationalism, as manifested in the two world wars.Collection: War
It is a well known and very important fact that America's founding fathers did not like taxation without representation. It is a lesser known and equally important fact that they did not much like taxation with representation.Collection: Father
Technology, under all circumstances, leads to planning; in its higher manifestations it may put the problems of planning beyond the reach of the industrial firm. Technological compulsions, and not ideology or political will, will require the firm to seek the help and protection of the state.Collection: Technology
There are a significant number of learned men and women who hold that any successful effort to make ideas lively, intelligible and interesting is a manifestation of deficient scholarship. This is the fortress behind which the minimally coherent regularly find refuge.Collection: Successful
There is an enormous thrust in our time to have a simple answer. And that simple answer is that all depends on Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve. And Alan, who is an old acquaintance of mine, is a marvelous performer in the impression he gives of enormously great perception.Collection: Simple
A drastic reduction in weapons competition following a general release from the commitment to the Cold War would be sharply in conflict with the needs of the industrial system.Collection: War
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.Collection: Believe
And there was a deeper, less visible effect of the Truman loyalty program. Seeing its consequences for certain individuals and fearing its intrusion on their own lives, many in the government sought protection by strongly asserting their anti-Communism. In the public action that ensued, policy was based not on reality but, instinctively or deliberately, on personal caution...Those who urged a militant and sometimes military anti-Communism were considered sound, trustworthy and personally safe; those who questioned such a course were politically unsafe, possible even slightly disloyal.Collection: Loyalty
The massive reduction in risk that is inherent in the development of the modern corporation has been far from fully appreciated.Collection: Risk