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Financial Capacity And Political Perspicacity Are Inversely Correlated. Long-run Salvation By Men Of Business Has Never Been Highly Regarded If It Means Disturbance Of Orderly Life And Convenience In The Present. So Inaction Will Be Advocated In The Present Even Though It Means Deep Trouble In The Future. Here, At Least Equally With Communism, Lies The Threat To Capitalism. It Is What Causes Men Who Know That Things Are Going Quite Wrong To Say That Things Are Fundamentally Sound.

-John Kenneth Galbraith

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Financial Capacity And Political

John Kenneth Galbraith

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Financial Capacity And Political Perspicacity Are Inversely Correlated. Long-run Salvation By Men Of Business Has Never Been Highly Regarded If It Means Disturbance Of Orderly Life And Convenience In The Present. So Inaction Will Be Advocated In The Present Even Though It Means Deep Trouble In The Future. Here, At Least Equally With Communism, Lies The Threat To Capitalism. It Is What Causes Men Who Know That Things Are Going Quite Wrong To Say That Things Are Fundamentally Sound.

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If You Feed Enough Oats To The Horse, Some Will Pass Through To Feed The Sparrows (referring To "trickle Down" Economics).

The World Of Finance Hails The Invention Of The Wheel Over And Over Again, Often In A Slightly More Unstable Version.

Genius Is A Rising Stock Market.

Over The Span Of Man's History, Although A Phenomenal Amount Of Education, Persuasion, Indoctrination And Incantation Have Been Devoted To The Effort, Ordinary People Have Never Been Quite Persuaded That Toil Is As Agreeable As Its Alternatives. Thus To Take Increased Well-being Partly In The Form Of More Goods And Partly In The Form Of More Leisure Is Unquestionably Rational.

In Numerous Years Following The War, The Federal Government Ran A Heavy Surplus. It Could Not (however) Pay Off Its Debt, Retire Its Securities, Because To Do So Meant There Would Be No Bonds To Back The National Bank Notes. To Pay Off The Debt Was To Destroy The Money Supply.

Economics Is Not An Exact Science.

Nostalgia Combines Regularly With Manifest Respectability To Give Credence To Old Error As Opposed To New Truth.

Much Discussion Of Money Involves A Heavy Overlay Of Priestly Incantation.

I Was Brought Up In Southwestern Ontario Where We Were Taught That Canadian Patriotism Should Not Withstand Anything More Than A Five-dollar-a-month Wage Differential. Anything More Than That And You Went To Detroit.

Any Country That Has Milton Friedman As An Adviser Has Nothing To Fear From A Few Million Arabs.

Ideas Are Inherently Conservative. They Yield Not To The Attack Of Other Ideas But To The Massive Onslaught Of Circumstance With Which They Cannot Contend.

The Miserable Consumption Of The Poor Is Partly The Result Of The Ostentatious Demands Of The Rich. There Isn't Enough For Both, And The Latter Get Far More Than They Need...but Could Anything Seriously Be Done About It?

The Complaints Of The Privileged Are Too Often Confused With The Voice Of The Masses.

In The Conventional Wisdom Of Conservatives, The Modern Search For Security Is Regularly Billed As The Greatest Single Threat To Economic Progress.

No Society Ever Seems To Have Succumbed To Boredom. Man Has Developed An Obvious Capacity For Surviving The Pompous Reiteration Of The Commonplace.

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.

The Accepted Ideas Of Any Period Are Singularly Those That Serve The Dominant Economic Interest...what Economists Believe And Teach, Whether In The United States Or In The Soviet Union, Is Rarely Hostile To The Institutions - The Private Business Enterprise, The Communist Party - That Reflect The Dominant Economic Power. Not To Notice This Takes Effort, Although Many Succeed.

The Individual Serves The Planning System Not By Supplying It With Savings And The Resulting Capital; He Serves It Far More By Consuming Its Products.

I've Been A Faithful Reader Of The Great Classical Documents Of Economics, Or Tried To Be.

There Are Days When The Result Is So Bad That No Fewer Than Five Revisions Are Required. In Contrast, When I'm Greatly Inspired, Only Four Revisions Are Needed.

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.

Do Not Be Alarmed By Simplification, Complexity Is Often A Device For Claiming Sophistication, Or For Evading Simple Truths.

Only Men Of Considerable Vanity Write Books; Consistently Therewith, I Worried Lest The World Were Exchanging An Irreplaceable Author For A More Easily Purchased Diplomat.

Get The Process Of Negotiation Away From The Small Specialized Group That Some People Have Called The "nuclear Theologians" ... Only A Few People Can Understand The Nature Of These Weapons ... This Kept The Whole Discussion To A Very Limited Group Of People Who, In A Way, Had Assumed Responsibility For Saying Whether We Should Live Or Die.

It Is A Commonplace Of Modern Technology That Problems Have Solutions Before There Is Knowledge Of How They Are To Be Solved.

Even The Word Depression Itself Was The Terminological Product Of An Effort To Soften The Connotation Of Deep Trouble. In The Last Century, The Term Crisis Was Normally Employed. With Time, However, This Acquired The Connotation Of The Misfortune It Described.

All Successful Revolutions Are The Kicking In Of A Rotten Door.

There Is An Insistent Tendency Among Serious Social Scientists To Think Of Any Institution Which Features Rhymed And Singing Commercials, Intense And Lachrymose Voices Urging Highly Improbable Enjoyment, Caricatures Of The Human Esophagus In Normal And Impaired Operation, And Which Hints Implausibly At Opportunities For Antiseptic Seduction As Inherently Trivial. This Is A Great Mistake. The Industrial System Is Profoundly Dependent On Commercial Television And Could Not Exist In Its Present Form Without It.

In The Affluent Society, No Useful Distinction Can Be Made Between Luxuries And Necessities.

It Was Herbert Spencer, Not Charles Darwin, Who Coined The Phrase Survival Of The Fittest.

Survival Of The Fittest

I Write With Two Things In Mind. I Want To Be Right With My Fellow Economists. After All, I've Made My Life As A Professional Economist, So I'm Careful That My Economics Is As It Should Be. But I Have Long Felt That There's No Economic Proposition That Can't Be Stated In Clear, Accessible Language. So I Try To Be Right With My Fellow Economists, But I Try To Have An Audience Of Any Interested, Intelligent Person.

Under The Privilege Of The First Amendment Many, Many Ridiculous Things Are Said.

It Takes A Certain Brashness To Attack The Accepted Economic Legendsbut Noneat All Toperpetuatethem. So Theyare Perpetuated.

More Investment Trusts Securities Were Offered In September Of 1929 Even Than In August - The Total Was Above $600 Million. However, The Nearly Simultaneous Promotion Of Shenandoah And Blue Ridge Was To Stand As The Pinnacle Of New Era Finance. It Is Difficult Not To Marvel At The Imagination Which Was Implicit In This Gargantuan Insanity. If There Must Be Madness Something May Be Said For Having It On A Heroic Scale.

What Was Needed Was A Policy That Increased The Supply Of Money Available For Use And Then Ensured Its Use. Then The State Of Trade Would Have To Improve.

If Anything Is Evident About People Who Manage Money, It Is That The Task Attracts A Very Low Level Of Talent, One That Is Protected In Its Highly Imperfect Profession By The Mystery That Is Thought To Enfold The Subject Of Economics In General And Of Money In Particular.

You Roll Back The Stones, And You Find Slithering Things. That Is The World Of Richard Nixon.

The Line Dividing The State From What Is Called Private Enterprise, Orat Least Fromthehighlyorganized Part Of It, Is A Traditional Fiction.

The Oldest Problem In Economic Education Is How To Exclude The Incompetent. A Certain Glib Mastery Of Verbiage-the Ability To Speak Portentously And Sententiously About The Relation Of Money Supply To The Price Level-is Easy For The Unlearned And May Even Be Aided By A Mildly Enfeebled Intellect. The Requirement That There Be Ability To Master Difficult Models, Including Ones For Which Mathematical Competence Is Required, Is A Highly Useful Screening Device.

We All Agree That Pessimism Is A Mark Of Superior Intellect.

[franklin Delano] Roosevelt Was The Central World Figure In The Two Great Disasters Of This Century - The Great Depression And World War Ii. By Contrast, Jfk Came In Relatively Peaceful, Agreeable Times.

The Enemy Of The Conventional Wisdom Is Not Ideas But The March Of Events.

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.

It Was Not Hard To Persuade People That The Market Was Sound; As Always In Such Times They Asked Only That The Dispiriting Voices Of Doubt Be Muted And That There Should Be Tolerably Frequent Expressions Of Confidence.

Those Who Yearn For The End Of Capitalism Should Pray For Government By Men Who Believe That All Positive Action Is Inimical To What They Call Thoughtfully The Fundamental Principles Of Free Enterprise.

War Remains The Decisive Human Failure.

A Wrong Decision Isn't Forever; It Can Always Be Reversed. The Losses From A Delayed Decision Are Forever; They Can Never Be Retrieved.

Nothing Is More Portable Than Rich People And Their Money

And There Was A Deeper, Less Visible Effect Of The Truman Loyalty Program. Seeing Its Consequences For Certain Individuals And Fearing Its Intrusion On Their Own Lives, Many In The Government Sought Protection By Strongly Asserting Their Anti-communism. In The Public Action That Ensued, Policy Was Based Not On Reality But, Instinctively Or Deliberately, On Personal Caution...those Who Urged A Militant And Sometimes Military Anti-communism Were Considered Sound, Trustworthy And Personally Safe; Those Who Questioned Such A Course Were Politically Unsafe, Possible Even Slightly Disloyal.

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.

To See Economic Policy As A Problem Of Choice Between Rival Ideologies Is The Greatest Error Of Our Time.

Agreeable As It Is To Know Where One Is Proceeding, It Is Far More Important To Know Where One Has Arrived.

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.

The Masters Thought They Were Loved Until One Day One Of Their Favorites Farted Loudly While Serving Dinner And The Next Day Was Gone. The Very First Manifestation Of The Classless Society Is The Disappearance Of The Servant Class.

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.

In Any Great Organization It Is Far, Far Safer To Be Wrong With The Majority Than To Be Right Alone.

There Are Times In Politics When You Must Be On The Right Side And Lose.

Much Literary Criticism Comes From People For Whom Extreme Specialization Is A Cover Either For Grave Cerebral Inadequacy Or Terminal Laziness, The Latter Being A Much-cherished Aspect Of Academic Freedom.

The Attraction Of Power We Take For Granted In Politics.. But In Economics...the Thrust...is For Pecuniary Return, For Money. And I Have Always Felt That Denies In The Economic World A Very Large Part Of The Motivation.

Truth Has Anciently Been Called The First Casualty Of War. Money May, In Fact, Have Priority.

Broadly Speaking, Keynesianism Means That The Government Has A Specific Responsibility For The Behavior Of The Economy, That It Doesn't Work On Its Own Autonomous Course, But The Government, When There's A Recession, Compensates By Employment, By Expansion Of Purchasing Power, And In Boom Times Corrects By Being A Restraining Force. But It Controls The Great Flow Of Demand Into The Economy, What Since Keynesian Times Has Been The Flow Of Aggregate Demand. That Was The Basic Idea Of Keynes So Far As One Can Put It In A Couple Of Sentences.

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.

The Power Of The Corporate Bureaucracy - The Power Of Technostructure (a Term That Did Not Take Off) - Is Something To Which I Still Adhere.

In Economics, Hope And Faith Coexist With Great Scientific Pretension And Also A Deep Desire For Respectability.

We Now In The United States Have More Security Guards For The Rich Than We Have Police Services For The Poor Districts. If You're Looking For Personal Security, Far Better To Move To The Suburbs Than To Pay Taxes In New York.

Security Guards

Ideas May Be Superior To Vested Interest. They Are Also Very Often The Children Of Vested Interest.

The Fully Planned Economy, So Far From Being Unpopular, Is Warmly Regarded By Those Who Know It Best.

There's No Question That In My Lifetime, The Contrast Between What I Called Private Affluence And Public Squalor Has Become Very Much Greater.

In The World Of Minor Lunacy The Behaviour Of Both The Utterly Rational And The Totally Insane Seems Equally Odd.

In Economics, The Majority Is Always Wrong.

Anyone Who Says He Won't Resign Four Times, Will.

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.

Wisdom... Is Often An Abstraction Associated Not With Fact Or Reality But With The Man Who Asserts It And The Manner Of Its Assertion.

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.

Under Capitalism, Man Exploits Man. Under Communism, It's Just The Opposite.

Financial Capacity And Political Perspicacity Are Inversely Correlated. Long-run Salvation By Men Of Business Has Never Been Highly Regarded If It Means Disturbance Of Orderly Life And Convenience In The Present. So Inaction Will Be Advocated In The Present Even Though It Means Deep Trouble In The Future. Here, At Least Equally With Communism, Lies The Threat To Capitalism. It Is What Causes Men Who Know That Things Are Going Quite Wrong To Say That Things Are Fundamentally Sound.

But Now, As Throughout History, Financial Capacity And Political Perspicacity Are Inversely Correlated.

Liberalism Is, I Think, Resurgent. One Reason Is That More And More People Are So Painfully Aware Of The Alternative.

It Is In The Long Run That The Corporation Lives.

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.

If You're Rich You Can Buy Books. If You're Poor, You Need A Library.

Poverty" Pitt Exclaimed "is No Disgrace But It Is Damned Annoying." In The Contemporary United States It Is Not Annoying But It Is A Disgrace.

Private Enterprise Did Not Get Us Atomic Energy.

If All Else Fails Immortality Can Always Be Assured By Adequate Error.

But There Is Merit Even In The Mentally Retarded Legislator. He Asks The Questions That Everyone Is Afraid To Ask For Fear Of Seeming Simple.

World War Ii Revealed Two Of The Enduring Features Of The Keynesian Revolution. One Was The Moral Difference Between Spending For Welfare And Spending For War. During The Depression Very Modest Outlays For The Unemployed Seemed Socially Debilitating, Economically Unsound. Now Expenditures Many Times Greater For Weapons And Soldiers Were Perfectly Safe. It's A Difference That Still Persists.

Modesty Is A Vastly Overrated Virtue.

It Is The Good Fortune Of The Affluent Country That The Opportunity Cost Of Economic Discussion Is Low And Hence It Can Afford All Kinds.

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.

From The Fact Of General Well-being Came The New Position Of The Poor. They Were Now In Most Communities A Minority. The Voice Of The People Was Now The Voice Of Relative Affluence. Politicians In Pursuit Of Votes Could Be Expected To Have A Diminishing Concern For The Very Poor. Compassion Would Have To Serve Instead - An Uncertain Substitute.

A Nuclear War Does Not Defend A Country And It Does Not Defend A System. I've Put It The Same Way Many Times; Not Even The Most Accomplished Ideologue Will Be Able To Tell The Difference Between The Ashes Of Capitalism And The Ashes Of Communism.

If Inheritance Qualifies One For Office, Intelligence Cannot Be A Requirement.

Almost Every Aspect Of Its (federal Reserve) History Should Be Approached With A Discriminating Disregard For What Is Commonly Taught Or Believed.

It Is My Guiding Confession That I Believe The Greatest Error In Economics Is In Seeing The Economy As A Stable, Immutable Structure.

I Predict, Not Because I Know, But Because I'm Asked.

If There Must Be Madness, Something May Be Said For Having It On A Heroic Scale

There Is Something Wonderful In Seeing A Wrong-headed Majority Assailed By Truth.

It Is Almost As Important To Know What Is Not Serious As To Know What Is.

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.

Only In Very Recent Times Has The Average Man Been A Source Of Savings.

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

Marx Profoundly Affected Those Who Did Not Accept His System. His Influence Extended To Those Who Least Supposed They Were Subject To It.

One Can Relish The Varied Idiocy Of Human Action During A Panic To The Full, For, While It Is A Time Of Great Tragedy, Nothing Is Being Lost But Money.

Economists, On The Whole, Think Well Of What They Do Themselves And Much Less Well Of What Their Professional Colleagues Do.

Some Things Were Never Meant To Be Recycled.

Some Things Are Meant To Be

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.

I've Been A Faithful Reader Of The Great Classical Documents Of Economics, Or Tried To Be. The First Book In The Field That I Ever Read Was Principles Of Economics By Alfred Marshall. I Suppose Subsequently I Would Have To Pick Out Keynes, Adam Smith, Marx.

The Threat To Men Of Great Dignity, Privilege And Pretense Is Not From The Radicals They Revile; It Is From Accepting Their Own Myth. Exposure To Reality Remains The Nemesis Of The Great -- A Little Understood Thing.

The Process By Which Banks Create Money Is So Simple That The Mind Is Repelled.

One Man's Consumption Becomes His Neighbor's Wish.

When You See Reference To A New Paradigm You Should Always, Under All Circumstances, Take Cover.

If We Were Not In Vietnam, All That Part Of The World Would Be Enjoying The Obscurity It So Richly Deserves.

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.

In The Assumption That Power Belongs As A Matter Of Course To Capital, All Economists Are Marxians.

Politics Is The Art Of Choosing Between The Disastrous And The Unpalatable.

I Talked About The Consolidation Of Power In The Hands Of The Corporate Bureaucracy, As Distinct From The Stockholders. To This View, I Still Strongly Adhere.

I Accept The Global Complex And Global Trade More Than Do Some Of My Liberal Colleagues Because I Consider This A Wise Alternative To National Tension And Conflict.

The Inborn Instability Of Capitalism Has Been Part Of The History Of The System For Several Hundred Years.

To Add To The Technostructure Is To Increase Its Power In The Enterprise.

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.

I Never Enjoyed Writing A Book More; Indeed, It Is The Only One I Remember In No Sense As A Labor But As A Joy.

When Everything Else Failed, We Can Still Become Immortal By Making An Enormous Blunder.

The Seminar In Economic Theory Conducted By Hayek At The L.s.e. In The 1930s Was Attended, It Came To Seem, By All Of The Economists Of My Generation - Nicky Kaldor , Thomas Balogh, L. K. Jah, Paul Rosenstein-rodan, The List Could Be Indefinitely Extended. The Urge To Participate (and Correct Hayek) Was Ruthlessly Competitive.

What Is Called A High Standard Of Living Consists, In Considerable Measure, In Arrangements For Avoiding Muscular Energy, For Increasing Sensual Pleasure And Enhancing Caloric Intake Above Any Conceivable Nutritional Requirement.

The Sense Of Responsibility In The Financial Community For The Community As A Whole Is Not Small. It Is Nearly Nil.

If We Are Concerned About Our Great Appetite For Materials, It Is Plausible To Decrease Waste, To Make Better Use Of Stocks Available, And To Develop Substitutes. But What About The Appetite Itself? The Major Cause Of The Continued Deterioration Of The Global Environment Is The Unsustainable Pattern Of Consumption And Production, Particularly In Industrialised Countries

There Is An Old Saying, Or Should Be, That It Is A Wise Economist Who Recognizes The Scope Of His Own Generalizations.

It Is Not The Individual's Right To Buy That Is Being Protected. Rather, It Is The Seller's Right To Manage The Individual.

In 1929 The Discovery Of The Wonders Of The Geometric Series Struck Wall Street With A Force Comparable To The Invention Of The Wheel.

Monetary Policy Suffers From The Unfortunate Absence Of Any Occult Effect. It Has Long Been Clear That Economic Management...would Be Greatly Facilitated If Resort Could Occasionally Be Had To Witchcraft.

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.

The American Colonies, All Know, Were Greatly Opposed To Taxation Without Representation. They Were Also, A Less Celebrated Quality, Equally Opposed To Taxation With Representation.

Taxation Without Representation

It Had Been Held That The Economic System, Any Capitalist System, Found Its Equilibrium At Full Employment. Left To Itself, It Was Thus That It Came To Rest. Idle Men And Idle Plant Were An Aberration, A Wholly Temporary Failing. Keynes Showed That The Modern Economy Could As Well Find Its Equilibrium With Continuing, Serious Unemployment. Its Perfectly Normal Tendency Was To What Economists Have Since Come To Call An Underemployment Equilibrium.

Perfectly Normal

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.

Even In Such A Time Of Madness As The Late Twenties, A Great Many Man In Wall Street Remained Quite Sane. But They Also Remained Very Quiet. The Sense Of Responsibility In The Financial Community For The Community As A Whole Is Not Small. It Is Nearly Nil. Perhaps This Is Inherent. In A Community Where The Primary Concern Is Making Money, One Of The Necessary Rules Is To Live And Let Live. To Speak Out Against Madness May Be To Ruin Those Who Have Succumbed To It. So The Wise In Wall Street Are Nearly Always Silent. The Foolish Thus Have The Field To Themselves. None Rebukes Them.

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.

Where Humor Is Concerned There Are No Standards - No One Can Say What Is Good Or Bad, Although You Can Be Sure That Everyone Will.

People Of Privilege Will Always Risk Their Complete Destruction Rather Than Surrender Any Material Part Of Their Advantage.

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.

There Is Little That Can Be Said About Most Economic Goods. A Toothbrush Does Little But Clean Teeth. Aspirin Does Little But Dull Pain. Alcohol Is Important Mostly For Making People More Or Less Drunk ... There Being So Little To Be Said, Much Is To Be Invented.

This Is A World Inhabited Not By People Who Have To Be Persuaded To Believe But By People Who Want An Excuse To Believe.

There Is Wonder And A Certain Wicked Pleasure In These Giddy Ascents And Terrible Falls, Especially As They Happen To Other People.

The Conventional View Serves To Protect Us From The Painful Job Of Thinking.

Nothing In Our Time Is More Interesting Than The Erstwhile Capitalist Corporation And The Erstwhile Communist Firm Should, Under The Imperatives Of Organization, Come Together As Oligarchies Of Their Own Members.

Technology, Under All Circumstances, Leads To Planning; In Its Higher Manifestations It May Put The Problems Of Planning Beyond The Reach Of The Industrial Firm. Technological Compulsions, And Not Ideology Or Political Will, Will Require The Firm To Seek The Help And Protection Of The State.

Much Of The World's Work, It Has Been Said, Is Done By Men Who Do Not Feel Quite Well. Marx Is A Case In Point.

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.

However, It Is Safe To Say That At The Peak In 1929 The Number Of Active Speculators Was Less - And Probably Was Much Less - Than A Million.

Milton Friedman’s Misfortune Is That His Economic Policies Have Been Tried.

I React To What Is Necessary. I Would Like To Eschew Any Formula.

All, The Intelligent And Stupid, Diligent And Idle, Have Been Swept Along On A Current Of Increased Output That, In The Usual Case, Owed Nothing Whatever To Their Efforts.

Because Of His Compassion Owen Was Always In Trouble With His Partners. They Would Have Much Preferred A Tough, Down-to-earth Manager Who Would Get A Days Work Out Of The Little Bastards.

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.

The Man Who Is Admired For The Ingenuity Of His Larceny Is Almost Always Rediscovering Some Earlier Form Of Fraud. The Basic Forms Are All Known, Have All Been Practiced. The Manners Of Capitalism Improve. The Morals May Not.

The Years Of The Great Depression Were A Superb Time For Economists Because People Not Knowing What Could Be Done Or What Should Be Done Would Always Assume That Maybe An Economist Had The Answer. If You Were Just A Lawyer In Washington, You Were Nobody. But If You Were An Economist, You Might Have The Answer.

The Traveler To The United States Will Do Wellto Prepare Himself For The Class-consciousness Of The Natives. This Differs From The Already Familiar English Version In Being More Extreme And Based More Firmly On The Conviction That The Class To Which The Speaker Belongs Is Inherently Superior To All Others.

My Rule On Honorary Degrees Has Always Been To Have One More Than Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

No Grant Of Feudal Privilege Has Ever Equaled, For Effortless Return, That Of The Grandparent Who Bought And Endowed His Descendants With A Thousand Shares Of General Motors Or General Electric.

We Are Becoming The Servants In Thought, As In Action Of The Machine We Have Created To Serve Us.

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.

No One Was Responsible For The Great Wall Street Crash. No One Engineered The Speculation That Preceded It. Both Were The Product Of Free Choice And Decision Of Hundreds Of Thousands Of Individuals.

The Modern Corporation Must Manufacture Not Only Goods But The Desire For The Goods It Manufactures.

A Drastic Reduction In Weapons Competition Following A General Release From The Commitment To The Cold War Would Be Sharply In Conflict With The Needs Of The Industrial System.

Seaboard Air Line, Which Was Thought By Numerous Innocents To Provide A Foothold In Aviation, Was Another Favorite, Although, In Fact, It Was A Railroad.

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.

Men Will Look Back In Amusement At The Pretence That Once Caused People To Refer To General Dynamics And North American Aviation And At&t As Private Business.

In Economics It Is A Far, Far Wiser Thing To Be Right Than To Be Consistent

The Income Men Derive From Producing Things Of Slight Consequence Is Of Great Consequence. The Production Reflects The Low Marginal Utility Of The Goods To Society. The Income Reflects The High Total Utility Of A Livelihood To A Person.

Had The Bible Been In Clear Straightforward Language, Had The Ambiguities And Contradictions Been Edited Out, And Had The Language Been Constantly Modernised To Accord With Contemporary Taste It Would Almost Certainly Have Been, Or Become, A Work Of Lesser Influence.

Speeches In Our Culture Are The Vacuum That Fills A Vacuum.

When You See Reference To A New Paradigm You Should Always, Under All Circumstances, Take Cover. Because Ever Since The Great Tulipmania In 1637, Speculation Has Always Been Covered By A New Paradigm. There Was Never A Paradigm So New And So Wonderful As The One That Covered John Law And The South Sea Bubble - Until The Day Of Disaster.

Power Is As Power Does.

No Ethic Is As Ethical As The Work Ethic.

In Dealing With Mr. Nixon, It Is Not Easy To Be Unfair. He Invites And Justifies All Available Criticism.

In The Autumn Of 1929 The Mightiest Of Americans Were, For A Brief Time, Revealed As Human Beings.

Happiness Does Not Require An Expanding Economy

In Recent Times No Problem Has Been More Puzzling To Thoughtful People Than Why, In A Troubled World, We Make Such Poor Use Of Our Affluence.

The Questions That Are Beyond The Reach Of Economics-the Beauty, Dignity, Pleasure And Durability Of Life-may Be Inconvenient But They Are Important.

It Is Possible That People Need To Believe They Are Unmanaged If They Are To Be Managed Effectively.

It's Great To Be With William Buckley, Because You Don't Have To Think. He Takes A Position And You Automatically Take The Opposite One And You Know You're Right.

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.

There Are Two Kinds Of Forecasters: Those Who Don’t Know, And Those Who Don’t Know They Don’t Know.

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.

Decision Has Greater Virtue And Force If Taken After There Has Been Eloquent Dissent.

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.

Of Late I Have Searched Diligently To Discover The Advantages Of Age, And There Is, I Have Concluded, Only One. It Is That Lovely Women Treat Your Approaches With Understanding Rather Than With Disdain.

A Businessman Who Reads Business Week Is Lost To Fame. One Who Reads Proust Is Marked For Greatness.

We Do Not Manufacture Wants For Goods We Do Not Produce.

Who Is King In The World Of The Blind When There Isn't Even A One Eyed Man?

The Only Function Of Economic Forecasting Is To Make Astrology Look Respectable.

I Am Worried About Our Tendency To Over Invest In Things And Under Invest In People.

Oligopoly Is An Imperfect Monopoly. Like The Despotism Of The Dual Monarchy, It Is Saved Only By Its Incompetence.

The Industrial System Requires That Prices Be Under Effective Control. And It Seeks The Greatest Possible Influence Over What Buyers Take At The Established Prices.

Washington Is A Place Where Men Praise Courage And Act On Elaborate Personal Cost-benefit Calculations.

The Drive Toward Complex Technical Achievement Offers A Clue To Why The U.s. Is Good At Space Gadgetry And Bad At Slum Problems.

If It Is Dangerous To Suppose That Government Is Always Right, It Will Sooner Or Later Be Awkward For Public Administration If Most People Suppose That It Is Always Wrong.

In All Modern Depressions, Recessions, Or Growth-correction, As Variously They Are Called, We Never Miss The Goods That Are Not Produced. We Miss Only The Opportunities For The Labour - For The Jobs - That Are Not Provided.

Very Important Functions Can Be Performed Very Wastefully And Often Are.

Inflation Does Not Lubricate Trade But By Rescuing Traders From Their Errors Of Optimism Or Stupidity.

Mr. David Stockman Has Said That Supply-side Economics Was Merely A Cover For The Trickle-down Approach To Economic Policy — What An Older And Less Elegant Generation Called The Horse-and-sparrow Theory: If You Feed The Horse Enough Oats, Some Will Pass Through To The Road For The Sparrows.

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