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Inflation does not lubricate trade but by rescuing traders from their errors of optimism or stupidity.

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
Inflation
Optimism
Stupidity
Errors
Trade
Doe
Rescuing
Traders

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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.
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In fact, the wage-price spiral is the functional counterpart of unemployment. The latter occurs when there is insufficient demand the spiral operates when there is too much and also,unfortunately, when there is just enough.
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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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In the conventional wisdom of conservatives, the modern search for security is regularly billed as the greatest single threat to economic progress.
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Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs.
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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.
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In economics, the majority is always wrong.
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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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Faced with having to change our views or prove that there is no need to do so, most of us immediately get busy on the proof.
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The first goal of the technostructure is its own security.
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The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.
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We live surrounded by a systematic appeal to a dream world which all mature, scientific reality would reject. We, quite literally, advertise our commitment to immaturity, mendacity and profound gullibility. It is as the hallmark of the culture. And it is justified as being economically indispensable.
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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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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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Genius is a rising stock market.
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The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce.
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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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Foreign policy is conducted for the convenience and enjoyment of people in Washington.
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Superficial observers have long criticized the United States for making a fetish of youth. This is unfair. Uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration, its national legislature rewards senility.
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