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Economics is not an exact science.

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
Science
Exact
Economics

More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

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All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.
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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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Pundits forecast not because they know, but because they are asked.
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The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.
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You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon.
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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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It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt and J.F Kennedy were Presidents in very different times.
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There is an enormous thrust in our time to have a simple answer. And that simple answer is that all depends on Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve. And Alan, who is an old acquaintance of mine, is a marvelous performer in the impression he gives of enormously great perception.
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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.
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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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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
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Emancipation of belief is the most formidable of the tasks of reform and the one on which all else depends.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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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Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego.
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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
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It was not hard to persuade people that the market was sound as always in such times they asked only that the dispiriting voices of doubt be muted and that there should be tolerably frequent expressions of confidence.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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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The family which takes it mauve and cerise, air conditioned, power-steered, and power braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards, and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground.
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No grant of feudal privilege has ever equaled, for effortless return, that of the grandparent who bought and endowed his descendants with a thousand shares of General Motors or General Electric.
John Kenneth Galbraith