John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes (1908-2006)

“There is no single cure for poverty, but we should not, in our sophistication, be afraid of the obvious ... We need to consider the one prompt and effective solution for poverty, which is to provide everyone with a minimum income.”

“There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That is precisely what makes its pursuit so interesting.”

“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”

“It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.”

“It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.”

“Did Keynes create a sense of hope? Oh, unquestionably. There was this breath of hope and optimism, and I came back from Cambridge to find a whole group of people here who had also read The General Theory.”

“Marx profoundly affected those who did not accept his system. His influence extended to those who least supposed they were subject to it.”

“The prime exponent of paper money in those years was Benjamin Franklin. He thought it a good and useful thing, and his advocacy had an intensely practical touch. He printed money for the colonial governments on his own printing press.”

“The [seminar in economic theory conducted by Hayek at the L.S.E. in the 1930s] was attended, it came to seem, by all of the economists of my generation — Nicky [Kaldor], Thomas Balogh, L. K. Jah, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, the list could be indefinitely extended. The urge to participate (and correct Hayek) was ruthlessly competitive.”

“It is David Ricardo's unique position in history that he was an innovating force in both capitalist and socialist thought.”

“Engels always considered himself a junior partner, and so, without doubt, he was. But that does not lessen his role. Had he not been the junior partner, much for which his senior partner is known would not have been done.”

“Anyone would expect that Malthus, who taught the future servants of the East India Company, would draw, for his pessimistic evidence, on the huge, poor and prolific population of India. There is, however, only passing reference to Hindustan in his great Essay on The Principle of Population.”

“The [seminar in economic theory conducted by Hayek at the L.S.E. in the 1930s] was attended, it came to seem, by all of the economists of my generation — Nicky [Kaldor], Thomas Balogh, L. K. Jah, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, the list could be indefinitely extended. The urge to participate (and correct Hayek) was ruthlessly competitive.”

“" Sir Eric Roll, a remarkably eclectic English student of Marx -- he has been a professor, a senior civil servant, an accomplished international negotiator who led the negotiations for both the Marshall Plan and the EEC, a banker, a member of the court of the Bank of England and a respected writer on the history of economic thought-- "”

“I was just reading an excellent and appropriately approving account of your work. It tells of those who vigorously oppose. My admiration and my personal reward from what you do has no qualification, so it is with all those I wittingly know. Do realize that this is your worthwhile majority and that dissenters are an essential proof of your merit. I should be clear: your column is the best regular reading on economics and politics that I’ve encountered over the last seventy-five years and even a few more.”

“In the mid-1960s, I was a typical left-wing undergraduate student at Caltech. For any social problem that arose, I had no doubt that the appropriate cure involved some form of government intervention. So, naturally, Galbraith was my hero, and I was therefore greatly excited when he came to my school in 1964 to give a speech in support of Lyndon Johnson’s campaign for the presidency. I confess that I cannot remember a lot of the details of the speech, but I know that I was disappointed. In particular, I recall feeling that his arguments for bigger government were not compelling. No doubt, this event started me on the road to doubting the wisdom of governmental activism and appreciating the wonders of free markets. When I discussed this experience with Ken after more than thirty years, his surprising reaction was to apologize for what must have been a bad speech. He said that he especially regretted his endorsement of Lyndon Johnson, who was later to become anathema to liberals because of his pursuit of the Vietnam War. If it had been me, I would have apologized mainly for Johnson’s Great Society programs.”

“In recent years economists and historians have increasingly turned their attention to modern economic institutions. Economists such as Edward S. Mason, A. D. H. Kaplan, John Kenneth Galbraith, Oliver E. Williamson, William J. Baumol, Robin L. Marris, Edith T. Penrose, Robert T. Averitt, and R. Joseph Monsen, following the pioneering work of Adolph A. Berle, Jr., and Gardiner C. Means, have studied the operations and actions of modern business enterprise. They have not attempted, however, to examine its historical development, nor has their work yet had a major impact on economic theory. The firm remains essentially a unit of production, and the theory of the firm a theory of production.”

“If there were justice in the world, John Kenneth Galbraith would rank as the twentieth century’s most influential American economist. He has published several books that are among the best analyses of modern US history, played a key role in midcentury policymaking, and advised more presidents and senators than would seem possible in three lifetimes. Yet today, Galbraith’s influence on economics is small, and his influence on US politics is receding by the year.”

“The general educated—the public that watches McNeil/Lehrer or read The New Yorker—thinks of Galbraith as an important economic thinker. Although Galbraith is a Harvard economics professor, however, he has never been taken seriously by his academic colleagues, who regard him as more of a “media personality”. The contrast between public and professional perception became particularly acute in 1967, when Galbraith made a grand statement of his ideas about economics in The New Industrial State, a book that he hoped would come to be regarded as being in the same league as John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory or even Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The book was rapturously reviewed in the popular press, but it met with indifference from the academics. Galbraith’s book wasn’t what they considered real economic theory. Not incidentally, the academics were right in believing that The New Industrial State could be safely ignored.”

“If Walter Bagehot was right that “one of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea,” Ken caused an extraordinary amount of pain. Both in his economic thinking and in his political activities, he was dedicated to resisting, and where possible overturning, what he famously called “conventional wisdom” (one of his many turns of phrase that have since become commonplace locutions). Rejecting the standard economic theory based on small, anonymous households and firms that autonomously engage in perfectly functioning markets, Ken instead saw an economic stage dominated by large, nameable actors: big business, big labor, big government. Sorting out their roles and respective power was central to his analysis, and the continually shifting tensions in the interplay among them—“countervailing power” in another of his deft phrases—was the real story of how an economy behaved.”

“An economist such as John Galbraith is as much a political scientist as Robert Dahl or David Truman.”

“I knew Galbraith in the old days; he sat for some little time in my seminar. I must say I am not altogether surprised at what has happened; for I have always thought him a dull fellow, well intentioned enough, but a sort of pedant of New Deal economics — just the kind of man to upset the business community without himself bringing any startling administrative ability to offset the loss of that which he had antagonized.”

“Political economy is an art as well as a science. John Kenneth Galbraith has always been a creative artist in formulating theories of the social world. His fabrications constitute the stuff of economic science.”

“He doesn't get enough praise. The Affluent Society is a great insight, and has become so much a part of our understanding of contemporary capitalism that we forget where it began. It's like reading Hamlet and deciding it's full of quotations.”

“Galbraith has often been compared to Keynes, and they had much in common. But the way they did their economics was very different. Keynes produced theories, Galbraith, theoretically-inspired sociology. Keynes thought that ideas ruled the roost; Galbraith thought it was structures of power. His was a non-Marxist version of class struggle, with the intelligentsia as the engine of social innovation and carrier of the "public purpose".”

“What Galbraith understood, and what later researchers (including this author) have proved, is that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" – the notion that the individual pursuit of maximum profit guides capitalist markets to efficiency – is so invisible because, quite often, it's just not there. Unfettered markets often produce too much of some things, such as pollution, and too little of other things, such as basic research. As Bruce Greenwald and I have shown, whenever information is imperfect – that is, always – markets are inefficient; hence the need for government action.”