John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes About Economy
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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.
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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.
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In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.
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There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.
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It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.
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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.
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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.
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Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.
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Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.
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The fully planned economy, so far from being unpopular, is warmly regarded by those who know it best.
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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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In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
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The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning.
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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.
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Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
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A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
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Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.
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The problem of the modern economy is not a failure of a knowledge of economics; it's a failure of a knowledge of history.
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Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
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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.
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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.
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Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
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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.
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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.
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Happiness does not require an expanding economy
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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.
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People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
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A very complicated mass of things influences the economy - the speculative effect, government policy, consumer borrowing and spending, the level of technical innovation (which I concede, although everyone emphasizes it too much), and much more - including, of course, the rate of inflation.
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The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.
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Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.
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