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
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
There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Politics
The individual serves the industrial system not by supplying it with savings and the resulting capital; he serves it by consuming its products.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Consumerism
In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Economics, Economy
In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Power
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
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
We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Pessimism
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
Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Past
We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Twentieth Century
Few things are more tempting to a writer than to repeat, admiringly, what he has said before.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Writers
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Humanity, Events, Enemy
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Politics, Memories
Unemployment is rarely considered desirable except by those who have not experienced it.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Work
Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Money
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Government
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
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Immortality, Failures, Mistakes
Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Liberalism
Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Wealth
Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Pessimism
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
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
The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Wealth
The happiest time of anyone’s life is just after the first divorce.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Divorce
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: Revolutionaries, Revolution, Revolutions
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
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.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Topics: Audiences
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
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