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A very complicated mass of things influences the economy - the speculative effect, government policy, consumer borrowing and spending, the level of technical innovation (which I concede, although everyone emphasizes it too much), and much more - including, of course, the rate of inflation.

John Kenneth Galbraith

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John Kenneth Galbraith
Age: 97 †
Born: 1908
Born: October 15
Died: 2006
Died: April 29
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John K. Galbraith
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Inflation
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More quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith

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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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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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In the early days of the crash it was widely believed that Jesse L. Livermore, a Bostonian with a large and unquestionably exaggerated reputation for bear operations, leading a syndicate that was driving the market down.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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I've been writing a book called The Economics of Innocent Fraud. I published part of it already in The Progressive (Free Market Fraud, January 1999). But I've been interrupted these last few months. It deals with all of the things we do, in an innocent way, to cover up the truth.
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No solution [to the problem of poverty] is so effective as providing income to the poor. Whether in the form of food, housing, health services, education or money, income is an excellent antidote for deprivation. No truth has spawned so much ingenious evasion.
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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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In the world of minor lunacy the behaviour of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd.
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I predict, not because I know, but because I'm asked.
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The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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I've long believed alas, that in highly organized industrial societies, capitalist or socialist, the stronger tendency is to converge - that if steel or automobiles are wanted and must be made on a large scale, the process will stamp its imprint on the society, whether that me be Magnitogorsk or Gary, Indiana.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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A point must be repeated: only the pathological weakness of the financial memory...allows us to believe that the modern experience of....debt...is in any way a new phenomenon.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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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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Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
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The notion that you would initiate a new product without preparing the way by persuasion and advertising and salesmanship is fantastic. It's an integral part of the system.
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There is wonder and a certain wicked pleasure in these giddy ascents and terrible falls, especially as they happen to other people.
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People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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One man's consumption becomes his neighbor's wish.
John Kenneth Galbraith