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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The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.
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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.
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Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
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Nothing in our time is more interesting than the erstwhile capitalist corporation and the erstwhile Communist firm should, under the imperatives of organization, come together as oligarchies of their own members.
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Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy—what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.
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By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.
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War remains the decisive human failure.
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Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.
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In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.
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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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THE GENIUS of the industrial system lies in its organized use of capital and technology. This is made possible, as we have duly seen, by extensively replacing the market with planning.
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Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.
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Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.
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Very important functions can be performed very wastefully and often are.
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It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
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Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.
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Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
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Economics is not an exact science.
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Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
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Increasingly in recent times we have come first to identify the remedy that is most agreeable, most convenient, most in accord with major pecuniary or political interest, the one that reflects our available faculty for action; then we move from the remedy so available or desired back to a cause to which that remedy is relevant.
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It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.
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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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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.