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
If we are concerned about our great appetite for materials, it is plausible to decrease waste, to make better use of stocks available, and to develop substitutes. But what about the appetite itself? The major cause of the continued deterioration of the global environment is the unsustainable pattern of consumption and production, particularly in industrialised countries
The more underdeveloped the country, the more overdeveloped the women.
I have never understood why one's affections must be confined, as once with women, to a single country.
It is the good fortune of the affluent country that the opportunity cost of economic discussion is low and hence it can afford all kinds.
Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs.
A nuclear war does not defend a country and it does not defend a system. I've put it the same way many times; not even the most accomplished ideologue will be able to tell the difference between the ashes of capitalism and the ashes of communism.
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.
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.
More die in the United States from too much food that from too little.
In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.
If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
In the choice between changing one's mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.
A drastic reduction in weapons competition following a general release from the commitment to the Cold War would be sharply in conflict with the needs of the industrial system.