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Complexity and obscurity have professional value - they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.

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
Men
Building
Complexity
Treachery
Class
Clarity
Criticized
Scab
Clear
Professional
Obscurity
Equivalents
Values
Competition
Outsiders
Priestly
Less
Image
Privileged
Scabs
Makes
Rules
Preserve
Trades
Keep
Trade
Academic
Apprenticeship
Things
Value
Preserves
Exclude

More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

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Nothing so denies a person liberty as the total absence of money.
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No society ever seems to have succumbed to boredom. Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace.
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The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
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Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
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For the sake of The Progressive, I will say that [Robert] La Follette was relevant, but he was the last.
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To see economic policy as a problem of choice between rival ideologies is the greatest error of our time.
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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 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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Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
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Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study.
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A more important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality.
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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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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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You will find that [the] State [Department] is the kind of organisation which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly too.
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The foresight of financial experts was, as so often, a poor guide to the future.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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American university presidents are a nervous breed I have never thought well of them as a class.
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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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Economic stimulation that works through the increased outlays to the affluent has, inevitably, an aspect of soundness and sanity that is lacking in expenditure on behalf of the undeserving poor.
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Conscience is better served by a myth.
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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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