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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

-John Kenneth Galbraith

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If We Are Concerned

John Kenneth Galbraith

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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

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

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

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.

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.

The Inborn Instability Of Capitalism Has Been Part Of The History Of The System For Several Hundred Years, Including Recurrent Speculative Episodes. There Should Be No Doubt In Anyone's Mind That We're Now Having Another One Of Those Speculative Episodes.

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.

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

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

There Is No Name For All Who Participate In Group Decision-making Or The Organization Which They Form. I Propose To Call This Organization The Technostructure.

Educators Have Yet To Realize How Deeply The Industrial System Is Dependent Upon Them.

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.

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

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

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.

Let’s Begin With Capitalism, A Word That Has Gone Largely Out Of Fashion. The Approved Reference Now Is To The Market System. This Shift Minimizes - Indeed, Deletes - The Role Of Wealth In The Economic And Social System. And It Sheds The Adverse Connotation Going Back To Marx. Instead Of The Owners Of Capital Or Their Attendants In Control, We Have The Admirably Impersonal Role Of Market Forces. It Would Be Hard To Think Of A Change In Terminology More In The Interest Of Those To Whom Money Accords Power. They Have Now A Functional Anonymity.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Survival Of The Fittest

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

Emancipation Of Belief Is The Most Formidable Of The Tasks Of Reform And The One On Which All Else Depends.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Men Have Been Swindled By Other Men On Many Occasions. The Autumn Of 1929 Was, Perhaps, The First Occasion When Men Succeeded On A Large Scale In Swindling Themselves.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Genius Is A Rising Stock Market.

Inventions That Are Not Made, Like Babies That Are Not Born, Are Rarely Missed.

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.

People Are The Common Denominator Of Progress; No Improvement Is Possible With Unimproved People.

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.

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.

More Die In The United States Of Too Much Food Than Of Too Little.

Funny Inspirational

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.

Nothing So Weakens Government As Persistent Inflation.

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 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.

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

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.

Why Is Anything Intrinsically So Valueless So Obviously Desirable?

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.

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.

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

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

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

Only Foolish People Are Completely Secure.

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.

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

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.

Economics Exists To Make Astrology Look Respectable.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 Do The Best With What Exists.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The Greater The Wealth The Thicker Will Be The Dirt.

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

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.

Third Party Politics, At Least Since La Follette, Has Always Had An Element Of Romance.

In A World Where For Pedagogic And Other Purposes A Very Large Number Of Economists Is Required, An Arrangement Which Discourages Many Of Them From

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.

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

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.

While It Will Be Desirable To Achieve Planned Results, It Will Be Even More Important To Avoid Unplanned Disasters.

The Notion That You Would Initiate A New Product Without Preparing The Way By Persuasion And Advertising And Salesmanship Is Fantastic. It's An Integral Part Of The System.

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

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.

At Best, In Such Depression Times, Monetary Policy Is A Feeble Reed On Which To Lean.

Monetary Policy

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

The Spirit Should Never Grow Old.

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.

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.

Talk Of Revolution Is One Of Avoiding Reality.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Were It Part Of Our Everyday Education And Comment That The Corporation Is An Instrument For The Exercise Of Power, That It Belongs To The Process By Which We Are Governed, There Would Then Be Debate On How That Power Is Used And How It Might Be Made Subordinate To The Public Will And Need. This Debate Is Avoided By Propagating The Myth That The Power Does Not Exist.

We Talk Of The Enormous Virtues Of Work, But It Turns Out That That Is Mostly For The Poor. If You're Rich Enough Or If You're A College Professor, The Virtue Lies In Leisure And The Use You Make Of Your Leisure Time.

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.

American University Presidents Are A Nervous Breed; I Have Never Thought Well Of Them As A Class.

American Universities

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Faced With The Choice Between Changing One's Mind And Proving That There Is No Need To Do So, Almost Everyone Gets Busy On The Proof.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

When People Are Least Sure, They Are Often Most Dogmatic.

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.

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.

Economists Are Generally Negligent Of Their Heroes.

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.

These Are The Days When Men Of All Social Disciplines And All Political Faiths Seek The Comfortable And The Accepted; When The Man Of Controversy Is Looked Upon As A Disturbing Influence; When Originality Is Taken To Be A Mark Of Instability; And When, In Minor Modification Of The Original Parable, The Bland Lead The Bland.

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

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.

Nothing Is So Admirable In Politics As A Short Memory.

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.

Some Things Were Never Meant To Be Recycled.

Some Things Are Meant To Be

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

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

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

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

Meetings Are Held Because Men Seek Companionship Or, At A Minimum, Wish To Escape The Tedium Of Solitary Duties. They Yearn For The Prestige Which Accrues To The Man Who Presides Over Meetings, And This Leads Them To Convoke Assemblages Over Which They Can Preside. Finally, There Is The Meeting Which Is Called Not Because There Is Business To Be Done, But Because It Is Necessary To Create The Impression That Business Is Being Done. Such Meetings Are More Than A Substitute For Action. They Are Widely Regarded As Action.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Modesty Is A Vastly Overrated Virtue.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

We Shall Have A Race Of Men Who Are Strong On Telemetry And Space Communications But Who Cannot Read Anything But A Blueprint Or Write Anything But A Computer Program.

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

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

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

Imperfect Things

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I Would Put Primary Emphasis On A Good Standard Of Living Equitably Distributed. It Can't Be Equal, But One That Eliminates The Terrible Cruelty Of Poverty.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

One Of The Greatest Pieces Of Economic Wisdom Is To Know What You Do Not Know.

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 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.

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.

A Person Buying Ordinary Products In A Supermarket Is In Touch With His Deepest Emotions.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Getting On The Cover Of Time Guarantees The Existence Of Opposition In The Future.

Economics Is Not An Exact Science.

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.

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

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.

It Is Not Necessary To Advertise Food To Hungry People, Fuel To Cold People, Or Houses To The Homeless.

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.

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.

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