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The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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John Kenneth Galbraith
Age: 97 †
Born: 1908
Born: October 15
Died: 2006
Died: April 29
Diplomat
Economist
Non-Fiction Writer
Politician
University Teacher
John K. Galbraith
Economist
Favourite
Function
Economic
Look
Looks
Forecasting
Make
Astrology
Respectable
More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith
No nice philosophical point has ever been so decisively resolved as this: that those who are not conceived do not miss the pleasure of consuming the goods they do not get born to enjoy.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed.
John Kenneth Galbraith
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.
John Kenneth Galbraith
This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks.
John Kenneth Galbraith
According to the experience of all but the most accomplished jugglers, it is easier to keep one ball in the air than many.
John Kenneth Galbraith
In public administration good sense would seem to require that public expectation be kept at the lowest possible level in order to minimize eventual disappointment.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Men are, in fact, either sustained by organization or they sustain organization.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Conscience is better served by a myth.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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
Commencement oratory must eschew anything that smacks of partisan politics, political preference, sex, religion or unduly firm opinion. Nonetheless, there must be a speech: Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.
John Kenneth Galbraith
These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence when originality is taken to be a mark of instability and when, in minor modification of the original parable, the bland lead the bland.
John Kenneth Galbraith
A very complicated mass of things influences the economy - the speculative effect, government policy, consumer borrowing and spending, the level of technical innovation (which I concede, although everyone emphasizes it too much), and much more - including, of course, the rate of inflation.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The years of the Great Depression were a superb time for economists because people not knowing what could be done or what should be done would always assume that maybe an economist had the answer. If you were just a lawyer in Washington, you were nobody. But if you were an economist, you might have the answer.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The foresight of financial experts was, as so often, a poor guide to the future.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.
John Kenneth Galbraith
In the conventional wisdom of conservatives, the modern search for security is regularly billed as the greatest single threat to economic progress.
John Kenneth Galbraith
