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
In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.
In the choice between changing one's mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.
Simple minds, presumably, are the easiest to manage.
It's a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction.
Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract.
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.
Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next.
One must always have in mind one simple fact - there is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor.
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.
The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.
More die in the United States from too much food that from too little.
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.
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.