John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) was a Canadian-born American economist and public servant. A leading scholar of the American Institutionalist school, he is one of the most famous economists of the post-World War II era.
Born in Iona Station, Ontario, and educated at the universities of Toronto, California, and Cambridge, he immigrated to the U.S. in 1931. In 1939, he became an assistant professor of economics at Princeton and held various administrative posts before becoming a professor of economics at Harvard 1949–75. He was U.S. ambassador to India 1961–63.
A Keynesian economist, Galbraith advocated government spending to stimulate the economy. He criticized American society’s obsession for consumer goods, arguing that a more significant portion of wealth should be spent on infrastructure, education, and other improvements shared by the public.
Galbraith was also known for the literary excellence of his writing on public affairs. His works include American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (1952,) The Great Crash (1955,) The Affluent Society (1958,) The Liberal Hour (1960,) The New Industrial State (1967,) The Age of Uncertainty (1977,) which was made into a BBC television series, The Anatomy of Power (1983,) The Culture of Contentment (1992,) and The Good Society (1996.)
Galbraith also wrote his autobiography, A Life in Our Times (1981.) He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice—in 1946 and 2000.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by John Kenneth Galbraith
No ethic is as ethical as the work ethic.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Work
People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Virtues, Virtue
The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations. But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Government
Once the visitor was told rather repetitively that this city was the melting pot; never before in history had so many people of such varied languages, customs, colors and culinary habits lived so amicably together. Although New York remains peaceful by most standards, this self-congratulation is now less often heard, since it was discovered some years ago that racial harmony depended unduly on the willingness of the blacks (and latterly the Puerto Ricans) to do for the other races the meanest jobs at the lowest wages and then to return to live by themselves in the worst slums.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Few things are more tempting to a writer than to repeat, admiringly, what he has said before.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Writers
Among all the world’s races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Information
Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Wealth
There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Virtue
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral hilosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Government
The happiest time of anyone’s life is just after the first divorce.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Divorce
Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality, but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Wisdom
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Communism
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Fear, Leaders, Risk, Leadership
There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Politics
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.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Business
One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Wisdom
There are a few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Diplomacy
Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Criticism
The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Accomplishment
An important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality. 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.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Age, Aging
In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Power
Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Past
In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Economy, Economics
Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Guilt
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Society, Opposition, Organization
Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Wealth, Riches
It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Reality
Increasingly in recent times we have come first to identify the remedy that is most agreeable, most convenient, most in accord with major pecuniary or political interest, the one that reflects our available faculty for action; then we move from the remedy so available or desired back to a cause to which that remedy is relevant.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Economics
Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man’s greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Money
When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It’s a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Democracy
All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Revolution, Revolutionaries, Revolutions
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Events, Enemy, Humanity
In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated. If the world is lucky enough to enjoy peace, it may even one day make the discovery, to the horror of doctrinaire free-enterprisers and doctrinaire planners alike, that what is called capitalism and what is called socialism are both capable of working quite well.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Economics, Economy
There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Science
We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Pessimism
The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Wealth
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