Quote

All, the intelligent and stupid, diligent and idle, have been swept along on a current of increased output that, in the usual case, owed nothing whatever to their efforts.

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
Nothing
Currents
Output
Intelligent
Diligent
Case
Swept
Along
Increased
Cases
Idle
Stupid
Usual
Effort
Efforts
Whatever
Current
Owed

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If it is dangerous to suppose that government is always right, it will sooner or later be awkward for public administration if most people suppose that it is always wrong.
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Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.
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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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Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.
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Even the word depression itself was the terminological product of an effort to soften the connotation of deep trouble. In the last century, the term crisis was normally employed. With time, however, this acquired the connotation of the misfortune it described.
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No ethic is as ethical as the work ethic.
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The more underdeveloped the country, the more overdeveloped the women.
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A wrong decision isn't forever it can always be reversed. The losses from a delayed decision are forever they can never be retrieved.
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Financial operations do not lend themselves to innovation. What is recurrently so described and celebrated is, without exception, a small variation on an established design . . . The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version.
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It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.
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Few economic problems, if any, are difficult of solution. The difficulty, all but invariably, is in confronting them. We know what needs to be done for reasons of inertia, pecuniary interest, passion or ignorance, we do not wish to say so.
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There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks.
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Private enterprise did not get us atomic energy.
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If you get a reputation for being honest, you have 95 percent of the competition already beat.
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A [New Yorker ] is what it has always been. It combines those who pursue the truth with those who pursue the rewards of orthodoxy and those who pursue what is comfortable to the rich.
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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.
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The power of the corporate bureaucracy - the power of technostructure (a term that did not take off) - is something to which I still adhere.
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Economics exists to make astrology look respectable.
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But it can be laid down as a rule that those who speak most of liberty are least inclined to use it.
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The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are.
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