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 Galbraith

Categorized in : Men Aberration Perfectly Normal

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

John Kenneth Galbraith

honesty integrity philosophy

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

John Kenneth Galbraith

witty men funny

Mr. 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 Galbraith

oats horse sides

The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.

John Kenneth Galbraith

simple mind bankers

There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.

John Kenneth Galbraith

investing kind two

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

John Kenneth Galbraith

home-economics employment government

The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled.

John Kenneth Galbraith

money simple mind

A wrong decision isn't forever; it can always be reversed. The losses from a delayed decision are forever; they can never be retrieved.

John Kenneth Galbraith

decision loss forever

No solution [to the problem of poverty] is so effective as providing income to the poor. Whether in the form of food, housing, health services, education or money, income is an excellent antidote for deprivation. No truth has spawned so much ingenious evasion.

John Kenneth Galbraith

income poverty problem

More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.

John Kenneth Galbraith

funny-inspirational weight-loss food

Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

John Kenneth Galbraith

agreement people thinking

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

John Kenneth Galbraith

change sweet inspirational

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

money love men

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

John Kenneth Galbraith

motivational jobs life

Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next.

John Kenneth Galbraith

change men peace

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

John Kenneth Galbraith

astrology economic looks

World War II revealed two of the enduring features of the Keynesian Revolution. One was the moral difference between spending for welfare and spending for war. During the Depression very modest outlays for the unemployed seemed socially debilitating, economically unsound. Now expenditures many times greater for weapons and soldiers were perfectly safe. It's a difference that still persists.

John Kenneth Galbraith

differences war two

Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.

John Kenneth Galbraith

sophistication complexity simple

The problem of the modern economy is not a failure of a knowledge of economics; it's a failure of a knowledge of history.

John Kenneth Galbraith

modern economics problem

Let’s begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes - indeed, deletes - the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity.

John Kenneth Galbraith

fashion would-be thinking