John Kenneth Galbraith
John Kenneth Galbraith
John Kenneth "Ken" Galbraith, OCwas a Canadianeconomist, public official, and diplomat, and a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s, during which time Galbraith fulfilled the role of public intellectual. As an economist, he leaned toward Post-Keynesian economics from an institutionalist perspective...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth15 October 1908
CountryUnited States of America
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.
The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
The inborn instability of capitalism has been part of the history of the system for several hundred years.
It is almost as important to know what is not serious as to know what is.
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.
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.
The problem of the modern economy is not a failure of a knowledge of economics; it's a failure of a knowledge of history.
There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. With something so important, a deeper mystery seems only decent.
It takes some skill to spoil a breakfast - even the English can't do it.
Third party politics, at least since La Follette, has always had an element of romance.
Wisdom... is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.