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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.

-John Kenneth Galbraith

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If A Man Didn't

John Kenneth Galbraith

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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 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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Meetings Are Indispensable When You Don't Want To Do Anything.

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.

Those Who Had Been Riding The Upward Wave Decide Now Is The Time To Get Out. Those Who Thought The Increase Would Be Forever Find Their Illusion Destroyed Abruptly, And They, Also, Respond To The Newly Revealed Reality By Selling Or Trying To Sell. And Thus The Rule, Supported By The Experience Of Centuries: The Speculative Episode Always Ends Not With A Whimper But With A Bang.

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.

In Central Banking As In Diplomacy, Style, Conservative Tailoring, And An Easy Association With The Affluent Count Greatly And Results Far Much Less.

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

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

Imperfect Things

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

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

It Takes Some Skill To Spoil A Breakfast - Even The English Can't Do It.

Every Corner Of The Public Psyche Is Canvassed By Some Of The Most Talented Citizens To See If The Desire For Some Merchandisable Product Can Be Cultivated.

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.

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.

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.

One Of My Greatest Pleasures In My Writing Has Come From The Thought That Perhaps My Work Might Annoy Someone Of Comfortably Pretentious Position. Then Comes The Realization That Such People Rarely Read.

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

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.

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.

The Privileged Have Regularly Invited Their Own Destruction With Their Greed.

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.

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.

Economics Is Extremely Useful As A Form Of Employment For Economists.

The Spirit Should Never Grow Old.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

If You Get A Reputation For Being Honest, You Have 95 Percent Of The Competition Already Beat.

Among All The World's Races, Some Obscure Bedouin Tribes Possibly Apart, Americans Are The Most Prone To Misinformation. This Is Not The Consequence Of Any Special Preference For Mendacity, Although At The Higher Levels Of Their Public Administration That Tendency Is Impressive. It Is Rather That So Much Of What They Themselves Believe Is Wrong.

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.

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.

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

Unemployment Is Rarely Considered Desirable Except By Those Who Have Not Experienced It.

All Successful Revolutions Are The Kicking In Of A Rotten Door. The Violence Of Revolutions Is The Violence Of Men Who Charge Into A Vacuum.

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

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.

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. If The World Is Lucky Enough To Enjoy Peace, It May Even One Day Make The Discovery, To The Horror Of Doctrinaire Free-enterprisers And Doctrinaire Planners Alike, That What Is Called Capitalism And What Is Called Socialism Are Both Capable Of Working Quite Well.

The Overall Effect Of The Rise Of The Industrial System Is Greatly To Reduce The Union As A Social Force. But It Will Not Disappear Or Become Entirely Unimportant.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

You Will Find That [the] State [department] Is The Kind Of Organisation Which, Though It Does Big Things Badly, Does Small Things Badly Too.

Economics Exists To Make Astrology Look Respectable.

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.

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

The Family Which Takes It Mauve And Cerise, Air Conditioned, Power-steered, And Power Braked Automobile Out For A Tour Passes Through Cities That Are Badly Paved, Made Hideous By Litter, Blighted Buildings, Billboards, And Posts For Wires That Should Long Since Have Been Put Underground.

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 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.

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

No Intelligence System Can Predict What A Government Will Do If It Doesn't Know Itself.

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.

Good Writing, And This Is Especially Important In A Subject Such As Economics, Must Also Involve The Reader In The Matter At Hand. It Is Not Enough To Explain. The Images That Are In The Mind Of The Writer Must Be Made To Reappear In The Mind Of The Reader, And It Is The Absence Of This Ability That Causes Much Economic Writing To Be Condemned, Quite Properly, As Abstract.

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

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.

Of All The Weapons In The Federal Reserve Arsenal, Words Were The The Most Unpredictable In Their Consequences.

Federal Reserve

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

It Would Be Foolish To Suggest That Government Is A Good Custodian Of Aesthetic Goals. But, There Is No Alternative To The State.

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

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

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.

Pundits Forecast Not Because They Know, But Because They Are Asked.

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.

Some Things Were Never Meant To Be Recycled.

Some Things Are Meant To Be

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 Myth That Holds That The Great Corporation Is The Puppet Of The Market, The Powerless Servant Of The Consumer, Is, In Fact One Of The Devices By Which Its Power Is Perpetuated.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Then Came The Second Amsterdam Discovery, Although The Principle Was Known Elsewhere. Bank Deposits...did Not Need To Be Left Idly In The Bank. They Could Be Lent. The Bank Then Got Interest. The Borrower Then Had A Deposit That He Could Spend. But The Original Deposit Still Stood To The Credit Of The Original Depositor. That Too Could Be Spent. Money, Spendable Money, Had Been Created. Let No One Rub His Or Her Eyes. It's Still Being Done-every Day. The Creation Of Money By A Bank Is As Simple As This, So Simple, I've Often Said, That The Mind Is Slightly Repelled.

Genius Is A Rising Stock Market.

One Must Always Have In Mind One Simple Fact - There Is No Literate Population In The World That Is Poor, And There Is No Illiterate Population That Is Anything But Poor.

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

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

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.

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

No Politician Can Praise Unemployment Or Inflation, And There Is No Way Of Combining High Employment With Stable Prices That Does Not Involve Some Control Of Income And Prices. Otherwise The Struggle For More Consumption And More Income To Sustain It-a Struggle That Modern Corporations, Modern Unions And Modern Democracy All Facilitate And Encourage-will Drive Up Prices. Only Heavy Unemployment Will Then Temper This Upward Thrust. Not Many Wish To Confront The Truth That The Modern Economy Gives A Choice Only Between Inflation, Unemployment, Or Controls.

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.

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.

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

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

It's A Rule Worth Having In Mind. Income Almost Always Flows Along The Same Axis As Power But In The Opposite Direction.

Inventions That Are Not Made, Like Babies That Are Not Born, Are Rarely Missed. In The Absence Of New Developments, Old Ones May Seem Very Impressive For Quite A Long While.

From The Spring Of 1941, I Controlled All Prices In The United States. You Could Lower A Price Without My Permission, But You Couldn't Raise A Price Without My Permission Or That Of My Staff.

We Have Escapist Fiction, So Why Not Escapist Biography?

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

Great Depression

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Man, At Least When Educated, Is A Pessimist. He Believes It Safer Not To Reflect On His Achievements; Jove Is Known To Strike Such People Down.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Foreign Policy Is Conducted For The Convenience And Enjoyment Of People In Washington.

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.

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.

Why Is Anything Intrinsically So Valueless So Obviously Desirable?

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.

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.

People Who Are In A Fortunate Position Always Attribute Virtue To What Makes Them So Happy.

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

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

I React Pragmatically. Where The Market Works, I'm For That. Where The Government Is Necessary, I'm For That. I'm Deeply Suspicious Of Somebody Who Says, 'i'm In Favor Of Privatization,' Or, 'i'm Deeply In Favor Of Public Ownership.' I'm In Favor Of Whatever Works In The Particular Case.

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

Only Foolish People Are Completely Secure.

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

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

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.

I Do The Best With What Exists.

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

Federal Reserve

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.

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

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.

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

Survival Of The Fittest

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.

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 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.

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

Preservationists Are The Only People In The World Who Are Invariably Confirmed In Their Wisdom After The Fact.

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.

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

The Shortcomings Of Economics Are Not Original Error But Uncorrected Obsolescence. The Obsolescence Has Occurred Because What Is Convenient Has Become Sacrosanct. Anyone Who Attacks Such Ideas Must Seem To Be A Trifle Self-confident And Even Aggressive. The Man Who Makes His Entry By Leaning Against An Infirm Door Gets An Unjustified Reputation For Violence. Something Is To Be Attributed To The Poor State Of The Door.

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

Perhaps Never Before Or Since Have So Many People Taken The Measure Of Economic Prospects And Found Them So Favorable As In The Two Days Following The Thursday [24th October 1929] Disaster.

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

Some Years, Like Some Poets,and Politicians And Some Lovely Women, Are Singled Out For Fame Far Beyond The Common Lot, And 1929 Was Clearly Such A Year.

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

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

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.

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

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

I Have Never Understood Why One's Affections Must Be Confined, As Once With Women, To A Single Country.

Money Is What Fueled The Industrial Society. But In The Informational Society, The Fuel, The Power, Is Knowledge. One Has Now Come To See A New Class Structure Divided By Those Who Have Information And Those Who Must Function Out Of Ignorance. This New Class Has Its Power Not From Money, Not From Land, But From Knowledge.

Capitalism Is Chronically Unstable.boom And Bust Has Always Marked Capitalism In The United States. There Were Panics In 1785, 1791, 1819, 1857, 1869, 1873, 1907, 1929 And 1987.in Economies And Politics, As In War, An Astonishing Number Of People Die, Like The Man On The Railway Crossing, Defending Their Right Of Way. This Is A Poorly Developed Instinct In Switzerland. No Country So Firmly Avows The Principles Of Private Enterprise But In Few Have The Practical Concessions To Socialism Been More Numerous And Varied.

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

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

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Jamie Lee Curtis

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