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
More die in the United States from too much food that from too little.
The traveler to the United States will do wellto prepare himself for the class-consciousness of the natives. This differs from the already familiar English version in being more extreme and based more firmly on the conviction that the class to which the speaker belongs is inherently superior to all others.
Superficial observers have long criticized the United States for making a fetish of youth. This is unfair. Uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration, its national legislature rewards senility.
What was needed was a policy that increased the supply of money available for use and then ensured its use. Then the state of trade would have to improve.
The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.
In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.
Poverty" Pitt exclaimed "is no disgrace but it is damned annoying." In the contemporary United States it is not annoying but it is a disgrace.
From the spring of 1941, I controlled all prices in the United States. You could lower a price without my permission, but you couldn't raise a price without my permission or that of my staff.
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.
Very important functions can be performed very wastefully and often are.