If people are hungry, ill-clad, unsheltered or diseased, nothing is so important as to remedy their condition.
John Kenneth GalbraithNo hungry man who is also sober can be persuaded to use his last dollar for anything but food.
John Kenneth GalbraithAgriculture is one economic activity that does not obey the laws of demand and supply.
John Kenneth GalbraithMoney is what fueled the industrial society. But in the informational society, the fuel, the power, is knowledge. One has now come to see a new class structure divided by those who have information and those who must function out of ignorance. This new class has its power not from money, not from land, but from knowledge.
John Kenneth GalbraithNostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.
John Kenneth GalbraithInflation does not lubricate trade but by rescuing traders from their errors of optimism or stupidity.
John Kenneth GalbraithIt was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.
John Kenneth GalbraithFranklin Delano Roosevelt and J.F Kennedy were Presidents in very different times.
John Kenneth GalbraithComplexity and obscurity have professional value - they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.
John Kenneth GalbraithIt is possible that people need to believe they are unmanaged if they are to be managed effectively.
John Kenneth GalbraithMr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy — what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.
John Kenneth GalbraithWe shall have a race of men who are strong on telemetry and space communications but who cannot read anything but a blueprint or write anything but a computer program.
John Kenneth GalbraithPower is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
John Kenneth GalbraithThe man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.
John Kenneth GalbraithThe process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.
John Kenneth GalbraithThere's no question that in my lifetime, the contrast between what I called private affluence and public squalor has become very much greater. What do we worry about? We worry about our schools. We worry about our public recreational facilities. We worry about our law enforcement and our public housing. All of the things that bear upon our standard of living are in the public sector.
John Kenneth GalbraithFor the sake of The Progressive, I will say that [Robert] La Follette was relevant, but he was the last.
John Kenneth GalbraithThe individual serves the planning system not by supplying it with savings and the resulting capital; he serves it far more by consuming its products.
John Kenneth GalbraithThere was the Missile Crisis, but one can't attribute to the [J.F.] Kennedy years anything like the problems that [Franklin] Roosevelt stood over and surmounted.
John Kenneth GalbraithThere's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.
John Kenneth GalbraithThe income men derive from producing things of slight consequence is of great consequence. The production reflects the low marginal utility of the goods to society. The income reflects the high total utility of a livelihood to a person.
John Kenneth GalbraithMuch literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover either for grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much-cherished aspect of academic freedom.
John Kenneth GalbraithClearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.
John Kenneth GalbraithPeople are the common denominator of progress. So no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills,and the other familiar furniture of economic development. But we are coming to realize that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.
John Kenneth GalbraithOver the span of man's history, although a phenomenal amount of education, persuasion, indoctrination and incantation have been devoted to the effort, ordinary people have never been quite persuaded that toil is as agreeable as its alternatives. Thus to take increased well-being partly in the form of more goods and partly in the form of more leisure is unquestionably rational.
John Kenneth GalbraithThe world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version.
John Kenneth GalbraithIf you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to "trickle down" economics).
John Kenneth GalbraithIt's great to be with William Buckley, because you don't have to think. He takes a position and you automatically take the opposite one and you know you're right.
John Kenneth GalbraithI was brought up in southwestern Ontario where we were taught that Canadian patriotism should not withstand anything more than a five-dollar-a-month wage differential. Anything more than that and you went to Detroit.
John Kenneth GalbraithIf anything is evident about people who manage money, it is that the task attracts a very low level of talent, one that is protected in its highly imperfect profession by the mystery that is thought to enfold the subject of economics in general and of money in particular.
John Kenneth GalbraithA person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
John Kenneth GalbraithI talked about the consolidation of power in the hands of the corporate bureaucracy, as distinct from the stockholders. To this view, I still strongly adhere.
John Kenneth GalbraithThe privileged have regularly invited their own destruction with their greed.
John Kenneth GalbraithI am not quite sure what the advantage is in having a few more dollars to spend if the air is too dirty to breathe, the water too polluted to drink, the commuters are losing out in the struggle to get in and out of the city, the streets are filthy, and the schools so bad that the young perhaps wisely stay away, and the hoodlums roll citizens for some of the dollars they saved in the tax cut.
John Kenneth GalbraithYou will find that [the] State [Department] is the kind of organisation which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly too.
John Kenneth Galbraith