It had been held that the economic system, any capitalist system, found its equilibrium at full employment. Left to itself, it was thus that it came to rest. Idle men and idle plant were an aberration, a wholly temporary failing. Keynes showed that the modern economy could as well find its equilibrium with continuing, serious unemployment. Its perfectly normal tendency was to what economists have since come to call an underemployment equilibrium.
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 GalbraithIf you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to "trickle down" economics).
John Kenneth GalbraithGood 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.
John Kenneth Galbraith