John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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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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Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
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It is in the long run that the corporation lives.
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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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Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong.
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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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Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.
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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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That one never need to look beyond the love of money for explanation of human behavior is one of the most jealously guarded simplifications of our culture.
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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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Economics is not an exact science.
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Wall Street's crime, in the eyes of its classical enemies, was less its power than its morals.
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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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By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.
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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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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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Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.
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He enlarged perceptibly the scope for debate, liberalized appreciably the intellectual and cultural life of the country and proclaimed the obvious truth that, after an atomic exchange, little would distinguish the Communist ashes from the capitalist ashes.
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Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
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Very important functions can be performed very wastefully and often are.
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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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Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
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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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But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.