John Kenneth Galbraith
238 quotes
Biography
John Kenneth Galbraith, also known as J. K.
"Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
"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."
"You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon."
"Also present, as a kind of co-host, was the rector of the state university. He asked me if I knew the difference between capitalism and socialism. In capitalism man exploits man. In socialism it is just the reverse."
"There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting."
"Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does."
"Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay."
"People are the common denominator of progress. So, paucis verbis, no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills, and the other familiar furniture of economic development. At some stages of development — the stage that India and Pakistan have reached, for example — they are central to the strategy of development. But we are coming to realize, I think, that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first."
"The imperatives of technology and organization, not the images of ideology, are what determine the shape of economic society....I am led to the conclusion that we are the servants in thought, as in action, of the machines we have created to serve us."
"Meetings are a great trap. … they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything."
"You will find that [the] State [Department] is the kind of organisation which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly too."
"In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability."
"Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths."
"Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom."
"Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs."
"Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy—what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows."
"Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence."
"Any consideration of the life and larger social existence of the modern corporate man... begins and also largely ends with the effect of one all-embracing force. That is organization — the highly structured assemblage of men, and now some women, of which he is a part. It is to this, at the expense of family, friends, sex, recreation and sometimes health and effective control of alcoholic intake, that he is expected to devote his energies."
"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."
"There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth."
"In the first place I identify this ["the equilibrium of poverty"] with primitive agriculture, and two factors have been at work there. One is, of course, population growth. If you were a poor farmer in India, Pakistan, or in much of Africa, you would want as many sons as possible as your social security. They would keep you out of the hot sun and give you some form of subsistence in your old age. So, you have pressure for population growth that is, itself, the result of the extreme economic insecurity. This is something which hasn't been sufficiently emphasized."
"One must always have in mind one simple fact — there is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor."
"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."
"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."
"People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy."