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John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
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![No solution [to the problem of poverty] is so effective as providing income to the poor. Whether in the form of food, housing, health services, education or money, income is an excellent antidote for deprivation. No truth has spawned so much ingenious evasion Picture Quote #1](https://img.picturequotes.com/2/67/66887/66887.webp "No solution [to the problem of poverty] is so effective as providing income to the poor. Whether in the form of food, housing, health services, education or money, income is an excellent antidote for deprivation. No truth has spawned so much ingenious evasion Picture Quote #1")
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It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
Faced with having to change our views or prove that there is no need to do so, most of us immediately get busy on the proof (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
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 Quotes)
It had been held that the economic system, any capitalist system, found it's 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 it's equilibrium with continuing, serious unemployment. Its perfectly normal tendency was to what economists have since come to call an underemployment equilibrium (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
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 Quotes)
Were it part of our everyday education and comment that the corporation is an instrument for the exercise of power, that it belongs to the process by which we are governed, there would then be debate on how that power is used and how it might be made subordinate to the public will and need. This debate is avoided by propagating the myth that the power does not exist (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
Then came the second Amsterdam discovery, although the principle was known elsewhere. Bank deposits...did not need to be left idly in the bank. They could be lent. The bank then got interest. The borrower then had a deposit that he could spend. But the original deposit still stood to the credit of the original depositor. That too could be spent. Money, spendable money, had been created. Let no one rub his or her eyes. It's still being done - every day. The creation of money by a bank is as simple as this, so simple, I've often said, that the mind is slightly repelled (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
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 Quotes)
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 Quotes)
No solution [to the problem of poverty] is so effective as providing income to the poor. Whether in the form of food, housing, health services, education or money, income is an excellent antidote for deprivation. No truth has spawned so much ingenious evasion (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
Few economic problems, if any, are difficult of solution. The difficulty, all but invariably, is in confronting them. We know what needs to be done; for reasons of inertia, pecuniary interest, passion or ignorance, we do not wish to say so (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
World War II revealed two of the enduring features of the Keynesian Revolution. One was the moral difference between spending for welfare and spending for war. During the Depression very modest outlays for the unemployed seemed socially debilitating, economically unsound. Now expenditures many times greater for weapons and soldiers were perfectly safe. It's a difference that still persists (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
One of the little-celebrated powers of Presidents (and other high government officials) is to listen to their critics with just enough sympathy to ensure their silence (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
In numerous years following the war, the Federal Government ran a heavy surplus. It could not (however) pay off it's debt, retire it's securities, because to do so meant there would be no bonds to back the national bank notes. To pay off the debt was to destroy the money supply (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I'm for that. Where the government is necessary, I'm for that. I'm deeply suspicious of somebody who says, 'I'm in favor of privatization,' or, 'I'm deeply in favor of public ownership.' I'm in favor of whatever works in the particular case (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
From the fact of general well-being came the new position of the poor. They were now in most communities a minority. The voice of the people was now the voice of relative affluence. Politicians in pursuit of votes could be expected to have a diminishing concern for the very poor. Compassion would have to serve instead - an uncertain substitute (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
In public administration good sense would seem to require the public expectation be kept at the lowest possible level in order to minimize the eventual disappointment (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when, in minor modification of the original parable, the bland lead the bland (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
One of the best ways of avoiding necessary and even urgent tasks is to seem to be busily employed on things that are already done (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
In the world of minor lunacy the behaviour of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
Wisdom... is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of it's assertion (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
Even in such a time of madness as the late twenties, a great many man in Wall Street remained quite sane. But they also remained very quiet. The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil. Perhaps this is inherent. In a community where the primary concern is making money, one of the necessary rules is to live and let live. To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who have succumbed to it. So the wise in Wall Street are nearly always silent. The foolish thus have the field to themselves. None rebukes them (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
More investment trusts securities were offered in September of 1929 even than in August - the total was above $600 million. However, the nearly simultaneous promotion of Shenandoah and Blue Ridge was to stand as the pinnacle of new era finance. It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity. If there must be madness something may be said for having it on a heroic scale (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)
We live surrounded by a systematic appeal to a dream world which all mature, scientific reality would reject. We, quite literally, advertise our commitment to immaturity, mendacity and profound gullibility. It is as the hallmark of the culture. And it is justified as being economically indispensable (John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes)