JK Galbraith Died April 29, 2006
Bio
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kenneth_Galbraith
Obituary
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/330355.stm
John Kenneth Galbraith, OC , Ph.D , LL.D (October 15, 1908 – April 29, 2006) was one of the most influential American economists of the twentieth-century. He was a Keynesian and an institutionalist, a leading proponent of political liberalism and progressive values with a gift for writing accessible, popular books on economic topics.
Galbraith served in the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson. In 1961, Kennedy appointed him ambassador to India, where he served until 1963.
Galbraith is one of the few who were two-time recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, having received one from President Truman in 1946 and another from President Clinton in 2000[3].
Quotes:
“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.”
“If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows.” - in relation to trickle-down economics
“Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.”
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”
“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.”
“If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.”
“It is a well known and very important fact that America’s founding fathers did not like taxation without representation. It is a lesser known and equally important fact that they did not much like taxation with representation.”
(Having been asked how he managed to write so much) “I wake up early, have a good breakfast, and begin.”
“Humility is not always compatible with truth.”
“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.”
“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil’s policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.
All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.
All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.
Anyone who says he won’t resign four times, will.
Commencement oratory must eschew anything that smacks of partisan politics, political preference, sex, religion or unduly firm opinion. Nonetheless, there must be a speech: Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.
Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.
In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
In economics, the majority is always wrong.
It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless.
Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.
Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.
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.
More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.
Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
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.
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
Talk of revolution is one of avoiding reality.
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.
There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.
There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.
There’s a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.
Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.
War remains the decisive human failure.
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.
Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
Aero
Melt THAT on your tongue