John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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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.
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In fact, the wage-price spiral is the functional counterpart of unemployment. The latter occurs when there is insufficient demand; the spiral operates when there is too much and also,unfortunately, when there is just enough.
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The notion of a formal structure of command must be abandoned. It is more useful to think of the mature corporation as a series of concentric circles.
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However, Hoover had converted the simple business ritual of reassurance into a major instrument of public policy.
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We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?
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It is not the individual's right to buy that is being protected. Rather, it is the seller's right to manage the individual.
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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.
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Because of his compassion Owen was always in trouble with his partners. They would have much preferred a tough, down-to-earth manager who would get a days work out of the little bastards.
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It's a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction.
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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.
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Who is king in the world of the blind when there isn't even a one eyed man?
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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.
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I've long believed alas, that in highly organized industrial societies, capitalist or socialist, the stronger tendency is to converge - that if steel or automobiles are wanted and must be made on a large scale, the process will stamp its imprint on the society, whether that me be Magnitogorsk or Gary, Indiana.
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Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study.
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The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning.
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War remains the decisive human failure.
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It was in World War I that the age-old certainties were lost. Until then aristocrats and capitalists felt secure in their position, and even socialists felt certain in their faith. It was never to be so again. The Age of Uncertainty began.
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Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs.
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Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
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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.
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Economics is not an exact science.
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There is no name for all who participate in group decision-making or the organization which they form. I propose to call this organization the Technostructure.
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Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
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In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.