John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes About Keynes

Quotes about: Keynes

• I've been a faithful reader of the great classical documents of economics, or tried to be. The first book in the field that I ever read was Principles of Economics by Alfred Marshall. I suppose subsequently I would have to pick out Keynes, Adam Smith, Marx.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Book, Faithful, Fields

  Source: www.progressive.org

• In Europe and the United States the two decades following the Second World War will for long be remembered as a very good time, the time when capitalism really worked. Everywhere in the industrialized countries production increased. Unemployment was everywhere low. Prices were nearly stable. When production lagged and unemployment rose, governments intervened to take up the slack, as Keynes had urged.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Country, War, Government

• 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

• Broadly speaking, Keynesianism means that the government has a specific responsibility for the behavior of the economy, that it doesn't work on its own autonomous course, but the government, when there's a recession, compensates by employment, by expansion of purchasing power, and in boom times corrects by being a restraining force. But it controls the great flow of demand into the economy, what since Keynesian times has been the flow of aggregate demand. That was the basic idea of Keynes so far as one can put it in a couple of sentences.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Couple, Mean, Responsibility

  Interview with Brian Lamb, Booknotes C-SPAN, November 13, 1994.

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