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
There is wonder and a certain wicked pleasure in these giddy ascents and terrible falls, especially as they happen to other people.
It's a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction.
Clerks in downtown hotels were said to be asking guests whether they wished the room for sleeping or jumping. Two men jumped hand-in-hand from a high window in the Ritz. They had a joint account.
Writing is a long and lonesome business; back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?
Nothing in our time is more interesting than the erstwhile capitalist corporation and the erstwhile Communist firm should, under the imperatives of organization, come together as oligarchies of their own members.
No grant of feudal privilege has ever equaled, for effortless return, that of the grandparent who bought and endowed his descendants with a thousand shares of General Motors or General Electric.
Power is as power does.
The foresight of financial experts was, as so often, a poor guide to the future.
Nothing is more portable than rich people and their money
Ideas may be superior to vested interest. They are also very often the children of vested interest.
I've long believed alas, that in highly organized industrial societies, capitalist or socialist, the stronger tendency is to converge - that if steel or automobiles are wanted and must be made on a large scale, the process will stamp its imprint on the society, whether that me be Magnitogorsk or Gary, Indiana.
But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.
The line dividing the state from what is called private enterprise, orat least fromthehighlyorganized part of it, is a traditional fiction.
You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon.