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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
Economics
Science
Exact

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One of the little-celebrated powers of Presidents (and other high government officials) is to listen to their critics with just enough sympathy to ensure their silence.
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The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning.
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Happiness does not require an expanding economy
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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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At best, in such depression times, monetary policy is a feeble reed on which to lean.
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The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.
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There are a significant number of learned men and women who hold that any successful effort to make ideas lively, intelligible and interesting is a manifestation of deficient scholarship. This is the fortress behind which the minimally coherent regularly find refuge.
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In the United States all business not transacted over the telephone is accomplished in conjunction with alcohol or food, often under conditions of advanced intoxication. This is a fact of the utmost importance for the visitor of limited funds... for it means that the most expensive restaurants are, with rare exceptions, the worst.
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I am for a close global association in trade and financial matters, rather than the opposite possibility of excessive nationalism, as manifested in the two world wars.
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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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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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It has been the acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all others with indignation.
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In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.
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Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks.
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In dealing with Mr. Nixon, it is not easy to be unfair. He invites and justifies all available criticism.
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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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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.
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Both we and the Soviets face the common threat of nuclear destruction and there is no likelihood that either capitalism or communism will survive a nuclear war.
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In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.
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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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