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I Am Not Quite Sure What The Advantage Is In Having A Few More Dollars To Spend If The Air Is Too Dirty To Breathe, The Water Too Polluted To Drink, The Commuters Are Losing Out In The Struggle To Get In And Out Of The City, The Streets Are Filthy, And The Schools So Bad That The Young Perhaps Wisely Stay Away, And The Hoodlums Roll Citizens For Some Of The Dollars They Saved In The Tax Cut.

-John Kenneth Galbraith

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I Am Not Quite

John Kenneth Galbraith

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I Am Not Quite Sure What The Advantage Is In Having A Few More Dollars To Spend If The Air Is Too Dirty To Breathe, The Water Too Polluted To Drink, The Commuters Are Losing Out In The Struggle To Get In And Out Of The City, The Streets Are Filthy, And The Schools So Bad That The Young Perhaps Wisely Stay Away, And The Hoodlums Roll Citizens For Some Of The Dollars They Saved In The Tax Cut.

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According To The Experience Of All But The Most Accomplished Jugglers, It Is Easier To Keep One Ball In The Air Than Many.

In A Community Where Public Services Have Failed To Keep Abreast Of Private Consumption Things Are Very Different. Here, In An Atmosphere Of Private Opulence And Public Squalor, The Private Goods Have Full Sway.

For The Sake Of The Progressive, I Will Say That [robert] La Follette Was Relevant, But He Was The Last.

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.

Economic Theory Is The Most Prestigious Subject Of Instruction And Study. Agricultural Economics, Labor Economics And Marketing Are Lower Caste Fields Of Study.

There Was The Missile Crisis, But One Can't Attribute To The [j.f.] Kennedy Years Anything Like The Problems That [franklin] Roosevelt Stood Over And Surmounted.

There's A Certain Part Of The Contented Majority Who Love Anybody Who Is Worth A Billion Dollars.

All Writers Know That On Some Golden Mornings They Are Touched By The Wand; They Are On Intimate Terms With Poetry And Cosmic Truth. I Have Experienced These Moments Myself. Their Lesson Is Simple: It's A Total Illusion. And The Danger In The Illusion Is That You Will Wait For Those Moments.

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

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

I Think Without A Doubt, That What Is Called "financial Genius" Is Merely A Rising Market.

Wealth Is Not Without Its Advantages And The Case To The Contrary, Although It Has Often Been Made, Has Never Proved Widely Persuasive.

The Massive Reduction In Risk That Is Inherent In The Development Of The Modern Corporation Has Been Far From Fully Appreciated.

Clerks In Downtown Hotels Were Said To Be Asking Guests Whether They Wished The Room For Sleeping Or Jumping. Two Men Jumped Hand-in-hand From A High Window In The Ritz. They Had A Joint Account.

Smoking Dope And Hanging Up Che's Picture Is No More A Commitment Than Drinking Milk And Collecting Postage Stamps. A Revolution In Consciousness Is An Empty High Without A Revolution In The Distribution Of Power.

Genius Is A Rising Stock Market.

The Urge To Consume Is Fathered By The Value System Which Emphasizes The Ability Of The Society To Produce.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Contented And Economically Comfortable Have A Very Discriminating View Of Government. Nobody Is Ever Indignant About Bailing Out Failed Banks And Failed Savings And Loans Associations... But When Taxes Must Be Paid For The Lower Middle Class And Poor, The Government Assumes An Aspect Of Wickedness.

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

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

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

The Ideas By Which People . . . Interpret Their Existence And In Measure Guide Their Behavior, Were Not Forged In A World Of Wealth.

Few Things Are As Immutable As The Addiction Of Political Groups To The Ideas By Whichthey Have Once Won Office.

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.

Power Is Not Something That Can Be Assumed Or Discarded At Will Like Underwear.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I Feel Very Angry When I Think Of Brilliant, Or Even Interesting, Women Whose Minds Are Wasted On A Home. Better Have An Affair. It Isn't Permanent And You Keep Your Job.

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

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.

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

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.

Agriculture Is One Economic Activity That Does Not Obey The Laws Of Demand And Supply.

The Salary Of The Chief Executive Of A Large Corporation Is Not A Market Award For Achievement. It Is Frequently In The Nature Of A Warm Personal Gesture By The Individual To Himself.

The Problem Of The Modern Economy Is Not A Failure Of A Knowledge Of Economics; It's A Failure Of A Knowledge Of History.

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.

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

Men Are, In Fact, Either Sustained By Organization Or They Sustain Organization.

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.

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

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.

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.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt And J.f Kennedy Were Presidents In Very Different Times.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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.

All Crises Have Involved Debt That, In One Fashion Or Another, Has Become Dangerously Out Of Scale In Relation To The Underlying Means Of Payment.

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

She Is A Reflection Of Comfortable Middle-class Values That Do Not Take Seriously The Continuing Unemployment. What I Particularly Regret Is That She Does Not Take Seriously The Intellectual Decline. Having Given Up The Empire And The Mass Production Of Industrial Goods, Britain's Future Lay In Its Scientific And Artistic Pre-eminence. Mrs Thatcher Will Be Long Remembered For The Damage She Has Done.

The Huge Capacity To Purchase Submission That Goes With Any Large Sum Of Money, Well, This We Have. This Is A Power Of Which We Should All Be Aware.

If People Are Hungry, Ill-clad, Unsheltered Or Diseased, Nothing Is So Important As To Remedy Their Condition.

There's No Question That In My Lifetime, The Contrast Between What I Called Private Affluence And Public Squalor Has Become Very Much Greater. What Do We Worry About? We Worry About Our Schools. We Worry About Our Public Recreational Facilities. We Worry About Our Law Enforcement And Our Public Housing. All Of The Things That Bear Upon Our Standard Of Living Are In The Public Sector.

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.

Why Is Anything Intrinsically So Valueless So Obviously Desirable?

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

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

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

Those Days [of The Vietnam War] You Couldn't Get On A Bus Going To The South Without Expecting A Riot Over Something Or The Other. All Of That Has Disappeared Thanks To Lyndon Johnson.

Nothing So Denies A Person Liberty As The Total Absence Of Money.

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

The Foresight Of Financial Experts Was, As So Often, A Poor Guide To The Future.

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

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

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

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.

The Happiest Time Of Anyone's Life Is Just After The First Divorce.

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.

Both We And The Soviets Face The Common Threat Of Nuclear Destruction And There Is No Likelihood That Either Capitalism Or Communism Will Survive A Nuclear War.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Charge That An Idea Is Radical, Impractical, Or Long- Haired Is Met By Showing That A Prominent Businessman Has Favored It?an Additional Tactic In This Strategy Of Defense?is To Assert That Winston Churchill Once Sponsored The Particular Idea. If One Is Challenged, A Sufficiently Careful Investigation Will Show That He Did.

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.

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.

In Europe And The United States The Two Decades Following The Second World War Will For Long Be Remembered As A Very Good Time, The Time When Capitalism Really Worked. Everywhere In The Industrialized Countries Production Increased. Unemployment Was Everywhere Low. Prices Were Nearly Stable. When Production Lagged And Unemployment Rose, Governments Intervened To Take Up The Slack, As Keynes Had Urged.

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 Real Accomplishment Of Modern Science And Technology Consists In Taking Ordinary Men, Informing Them Narrowly And Deeply And Then, Through Appropriate Organization, Arranging To Have Their Knowledge Combined With That Of Other Specialized But Equally Ordinary Men. This Dispenses With The Need For Genius. The Resulting Performance, Though Less Inspiring, Is Far More Predictable.

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

The Spirit Should Never Grow Old.

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.

Ralph [ Nader] Is An Old Friend Of Mine, And He Does A Useful Job In Displaying A Position.

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

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

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 The Old Days, Land Was Important As The Giver Of All Things. That Period Is Gone Now. Technology And Brainpower Are All That Matters And Yet Conflicts Over Land, Specially One Like On The India-china Border, That Yields Nothing, Continue. This Is A Burden Of Ancient History That We Continue To Carry. If Tomorrow There Is Settlement On Planet Mars, We Will Begin To Worry If Others Are Interested.

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

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

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.

I Was In Charge Of Price Controls In World War Ii And Had A Ceiling On Overall Prices. Everybody Who Was Subject To General Maximum Price Regulation Wanted An Exception And Went To Congress To Persuade A Congressman, Or A Group Of People On The Hill, That I Was Being A Menace To Their Industry.

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

Conscience Is Better Served By A Myth.

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 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

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

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.

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.

Few Can Believe That Suffering, Especially By Others, Is In Vain. Anything That Is Disagreeable Must Surely Have Beneficial Economic Effects.

Hermann Goering, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Walther Frank, Julius Streicher And Robert Ley Did Pass Under My Inspectionand Interrogation In 1945 But They Only Proved That National Socialism Was A Gangster Interlude At A Rather Low Order Of Mental Capacity And With A Surprisingly High Incidence Of Alcoholism.

Nothing Is More Portable Than Rich People And Their Money

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.

In The United States, Though Power Corrupts, The Expectation Of Power Paralyzes.

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.

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.

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.

Economists Are Economical, Among Other Things, Of Ideas; Most Make Those Of Their Graduate Days Do For A Lifetime.

Partly, The Russian System Succeeds Because, In Contrast To The Western Industrial Economies, It Makes Full Use Of Its Manpower.

Few Things In Life Can Be So Appalling As The Difference Between A Dry Antiseptic Statement Of A Principle By A Well Spoken Man In A Quiet Office, And What Happens To People When That Principle Is Put Into Practice.

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.

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.

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

Survival Of The Fittest

I Do The Best With What Exists.

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.

War Remains The Decisive Human Failure.

If A Man Didn't Make Sense, The Scotch Felt It Was Misplaced Politeness To Try To Keep Him From Knowing It. Better That He Be Aware Of His Reputation, For This Would Encourage Reticence Which Goes Well With Stupidity.

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.

Wealth, In Even The Most Improbable Cases, Manages To Convey The Aspect Of Intelligence.

I Think The Role Of The Federal Reserve Is Enormously Exaggerated.

Federal Reserve

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Things That Come From The Private Sector Are In Abundant Supply; Things That Depend On The Public Sector Are Widely A Problem. We're A World, As I Said In The Affluent Society, Of Filthy Streets And Clean Houses, Poor Schools And Expensive Television.

Economic Life, As Always, Is A Matrix In Which Result Becomes Cause And Cause Becomes Result.

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.

That One Never Need To Look Beyond The Love Of Money For Explanation Of Human Behavior Is One Of The Most Jealously Guarded Simplification Of Our Culture.

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.

There Was Something Superficial In Attributing Anything So Awful As The Great Depression To Anything So Insubstantial As Speculation In Common Stocks.

Great Depression

No Hungry Man Who Is Also Sober Can Be Persuaded To Use His Last Dollar For Anything But Food.

People Are The Common Denominator Of Progress. So No Improvement Is Possible With Unimproved People, And Advance Is Certain When People Are Liberated And Educated. It Would Be Wrong To Dismiss The Importance Of Roads, Railroads, Power Plants, Mills,and The Other Familiar Furniture Of Economic Development. But We Are Coming To Realize That There Is A Certain Sterility In Economic Monuments That Stand Alone In A Sea Of Illiteracy. Conquest Of Illiteracy Comes First.

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.

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

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

We Have Escapist Fiction, So Why Not Escapist Biography?

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.

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

In Economics, The Majority Is Always Wrong.

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

No Nice Philosophical Point Has Ever Been So Decisively Resolved As This: That Those Who Are Not Conceived Do Not Miss The Pleasure Of Consuming The Goods They Do Not Get Born To Enjoy.

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 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.

There Can Be Few Fields Of Human Endeavor In Which History Counts For So Little As In The World Of Finance.past Experience, To The Extent That It Is Part Of Memory At All, Is Dismissed As The Primitive Refuge Of The Those Who Do Not Have Insight To Appreciate The Incredible Wonders Of The Present.

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.

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.

The Size Of General Motors Is In The Service Not Of Monopoly Or The Economies Of Scale But Of Planning.

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

There Is Certainly No Absolute Standard Of Beauty. That Precisely Is What Makes Its Pursuit So Interesting.

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

I Begin With The Renaming Of The System. It Used To Be Capitalism. But That Evokes [karl] Marx And [john] Rockefeller. So Now We Speak Of The Market System. That Is A Nice Bland Expression, Which Forgets Those Off-color References.

Foresight Is An Imperfect Thing - All Prevision In Economics Is Imperfect.

Imperfect Things

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

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.

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.

Money Differs From An Automobile Or Mistress In Being Equally Important To Those Who Have It And Those Who Do Not.

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.

By All But The Pathologically Romantic, It Is Now Recognized That This Is Not The Age Of The Small Man.

Authorship Of Any Sort Is A Fantastic Indulgence Of The Ego.

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.

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.

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

One Of The Best Ways Of Avoiding Necessary And Even Urgent Tasks Is To Seem To Be Busily Employed On Things That Are Already Done.

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

The First Goal Of The Technostructure Is Its Own Security.

The Metropolis Should Have Been Aborted Long Before It Became New York, London Or Tokyo.

[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.

Few People At The Beginning Of The Nineteenth Century Needed An Adman To Tell Them What They Wanted.

The Oldest [john Kenneth] Galbraith Rule Is That When You Hear That A New Era Has Dawned, You Should Take Cover.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I've Become Accustomed To Supporting Politicians Who Are More Conservative Than I Am. This Is Not Entirely A Surprise.

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

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

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

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

Of All Classes The Rich Are The Most Noticed And The Least Studied.

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.

The Stock Market Is But A Mirror Which Provides An Image Of The Underlying Or Fundamental Economic Situation. Cause And Effect Run From The Economy To The Stock Market, Never The Reverse. In 1929 The Economy Was Headed For Trouble. Eventually That Trouble Was Violently Reflected In Wall Street.

When People Put Their Ballots In The Boxes, They Are, By That Act, Inoculated Against The Feeling That The Government Is Not Theirs. They Then Accept, In Some Measure, That Its Errors Are Their Errors, Its Aberrations Their Aberrations, That Any Revolt Will Be Against Them. It's A Remarkably Shrewd And Rather Conservative Arrangement When One Thinks Of It.

Democracies Have

Change Comes Not From Men And Women Changing Their Minds, But From The Change From One Generation To The Next.

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.

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

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

It's Much Easier To Point Out The Problem Than It Is To Say Just How It Should Be Solved.

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.

The More Underdeveloped The Country, The More Overdeveloped The Women.

But It Can Be Laid Down As A Rule That Those Who Speak Most Of Liberty Are Least Inclined To Use It.

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

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

A Good Rule Of Conversation Is Never Answer A Foolish Question.

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.

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