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
Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.
The charge that an idea is radical, impractical, or long- haired is met by showing that a prominent businessman has favored it?an additional tactic in this strategy of defense?is to assert that Winston Churchill once sponsored the particular idea. If one is challenged, a sufficiently careful investigation will show that he did.
Few things are as immutable as the addiction of political groups to the ideas by whichthey have once won office.
Ideas may be superior to vested interest. They are also very often the children of vested interest.
Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend.
There are a significant number of learned men and women who hold that any successful effort to make ideas lively, intelligible and interesting is a manifestation of deficient scholarship. This is the fortress behind which the minimally coherent regularly find refuge.
Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.
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.
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
The ideas by which people . . . interpret their existence and in measure guide their behavior, were not forged in a world of wealth.
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.