Quote

The urge to consume is fathered by the value system which emphasizes the ability of the society to produce.

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
System
Ability
Fathered
Society
Emphasizes
Values
Consume
Urge
Urges
Value
Produce

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Genius is a rising stock market.
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THE GENIUS of the industrial system lies in its organized use of capital and technology. This is made possible, as we have duly seen, by extensively replacing the market with planning.
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It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
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The present age of contentment will come to an end only when and if the adverse developments that it fosters challenge the sense of comfortable well-being
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I've long believed alas, that in highly organized industrial societies, capitalist or socialist, the stronger tendency is to converge - that if steel or automobiles are wanted and must be made on a large scale, the process will stamp its imprint on the society, whether that me be Magnitogorsk or Gary, Indiana.
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Consumer wants can have bizarre, frivolous, or even immoral origins, and an admirable case can still be made for a society that seeks to satisfy them. But the case cannot stand if it is the process of satisfying wants that create the wants.
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In 1736, Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette printed an apology for its irregular appearence because its printer was with the Press, labouring for the publick Good, to make Money more plentiful. The press was busy printing money.
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People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
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Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
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We shall have a race of men who are strong on telemetry and space communications but who cannot read anything but a blueprint or write anything but a computer program.
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Only in very recent times has the average man been a source of savings.
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According to the experience of all but the most accomplished jugglers, it is easier to keep one ball in the air than many.
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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.
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I never enjoyed writing a book more indeed, it is the only one I remember in no sense as a labor but as a joy.
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I've become accustomed to supporting politicians who are more conservative than I am. This is not entirely a surprise.
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Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.
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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.
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Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend.
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Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention, but it has no persuasive value at all.
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I've been writing a book called The Economics of Innocent Fraud. I published part of it already in The Progressive (Free Market Fraud, January 1999). But I've been interrupted these last few months. It deals with all of the things we do, in an innocent way, to cover up the truth.
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