John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes About Economy

Quotes about: Economy

• 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.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Business, Awards, Achievement

  Annals of an Abiding Liberal ch. 6 (1979)

• A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Ordinary, Buying, Emotion

  "The psychology of impulsive shopping" by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, www.theguardian.com. November 26, 2015.

• Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Power, Underwear, Economy

  John Kenneth Galbraith (1968). “The New Industrial State”

• All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Successful, Men, Doors

  John Kenneth Galbraith (2001). “The Essential Galbraith”, p.186, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• 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.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Struggle, Giving, Choices

• We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Money, Doctrine, Littles

  The Guardian, November 20, 1991.

• In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Faith, Desire, Economics

  The New York Times Magazine, June 07, 1970.

• Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Wealth, Prosperity, Finance

  "The Sydney Morning Herald" Newspaper, May 22, 1982.

• The problem of the modern economy is not a failure of a knowledge of economics; it's a failure of a knowledge of history.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Problem, Economics, Modern

  Source: www.progressive.org

• The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Character, Wealth, Building

• Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Believe, Suffering, Economics

  "The Age of Uncertainty". Book by John Kenneth Galbraith, 1977.

• Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Change, Business, Organization

  John Kenneth Galbraith (1969). “Ambassador's Journal”

• It had been held that the economic system, any capitalist system, found its equilibrium at full employment. Left to itself, it was thus that it came to rest. Idle men and idle plant were an aberration, a wholly temporary failing. Keynes showed that the modern economy could as well find its equilibrium with continuing, serious unemployment. Its perfectly normal tendency was to what economists have since come to call an underemployment equilibrium.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Men, Perfectly Normal, Aberration

  John Kenneth Galbraith (2001). “The Essential Galbraith”, p.234, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Capitalism is chronically unstable.Boom and bust has always marked capitalism in the United States. There were panics in 1785, 1791, 1819, 1857, 1869, 1873, 1907, 1929 and 1987.In economies and politics, as in war, an astonishing number of people die, like the man on the railway crossing, defending their right of way. This is a poorly developed instinct in Switzerland. No country so firmly avows the principles of private enterprise but in few have the practical concessions to socialism been more numerous and varied.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Country, War, Men

• The accepted ideas of any period are singularly those that serve the dominant economic interest...What economists believe and teach, whether in the United States or in the Soviet Union, is rarely hostile to the institutions - the private business enterprise, the Communist Party - that reflect the dominant economic power. Not to notice this takes effort, although many succeed.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Party, Believe, Ideas

• In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated. If the world is lucky enough to enjoy peace, it may even one day make the discovery, to the horror of doctrinaire free-enterprisers and doctrinaire planners alike, that what is called capitalism and what is called socialism are both capable of working quite well.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Peace, Discovery, Choices

  "Years of the Modern". Book by by J.W. Chase, 1949.

• Happiness does not require an expanding economy

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Business, Doe, Management

• Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Wisdom, Ideas, Politics

• Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover either for grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much-cherished aspect of academic freedom.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Freedom, People, Criticism

  "H.L. Mencken: The Baltimore Oracle" by John Kenneth Galbraith, www.washingtonpost.com. September 14, 1980.

• Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Wealth, Prosperity, Finance

  John Kenneth Galbraith (1998). “The Affluent Society”, p.1, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention, but it has no persuasive value at all.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Humor, Attention, Economy

• It has been the acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all others with indignation.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Economy, Treats, Marxist

  John Kenneth Galbraith (2001). “The Essential Galbraith”, p.191, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Umpires, People, Virtue

  The Guardian, May 23, 1992.

• The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Economic, Economy, States

  John Kenneth Galbraith (1987). “Economics in Perspective: A Critical History”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Biographies, Why Not, Fiction

  1980 In the NewYork Times, 27 Jul.

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