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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In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
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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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Economics is not an exact science.
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If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
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The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations... But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.
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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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Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
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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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It is in the long run that the corporation lives.
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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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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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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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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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In accordance with an old but not outworn tradition, it might now be wise for all to conclude that crime, or even misbehavior, is the act of an individual, not the predisposition of a class.
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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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Wall Street's crime, in the eyes of its classical enemies, was less its power than its morals.
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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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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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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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By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.
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Very important functions can be performed very wastefully and often are.
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All, the intelligent and stupid, diligent and idle, have been swept along on a current of increased output that, in the usual case, owed nothing whatever to their efforts.