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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.

-John Kenneth Galbraith

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In The Old Days,

John Kenneth Galbraith

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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.

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

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.

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.

Economics Is Not An Exact Science.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

The Senate Has Unlimited Debate; In The House, Debate Is Ruthlessly Circumscribed. There Is Frequent Discussion As To Which Technique Most Effectively Frustrates Democratic Process.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Talk Of Revolution Is One Of Avoiding Reality.

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.

I've Been Writing A Book Called The Economics Of Innocent Fraud. I Published Part Of It Already In The Progressive ("free Market Fraud," January 1999). But I've Been Interrupted These Last Few Months. It Deals With All Of The Things We Do, In An Innocent Way, To Cover Up The Truth.

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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.

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.

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There Is A Common Tendency To Ignore The Poor Or To Develop Some Rationalisation For The Good Fortune Of The Fortunate.

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

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Banking May Well Be A Career From Which No Man Really Recovers.

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The Greater The Wealth The Thicker Will Be The Dirt.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Writing Is A Long And Lonesome Business; Back Of The Problems In Thought And Composition Hover Always The Awful Questions: Is This The Page That Shows The Empty Shell? Is It Here And Now That They Find Me Out?

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.

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

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In Economics, Unlike Fiction And The Theater, There Is No Harm In A Premature Disclosure Of The Plot: It Is To See The Changes Just Mentioned And Others As An Interlocked Whole.

It Is In The Long Run That The Corporation Lives.

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

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

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

Of All The Mysteries Of The Stock Exchange There Is None So Impenetrable As Why There Should Be A Buyer For Everyone Who Seeks To Sell.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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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.

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.

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

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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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great Depression

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Nothing Is So Admirable In Politics As A Short Memory.

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

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Perfectly Normal

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

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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.

The Commencement Speech Is Not, I Think, A Wholly Satisfactory Manifestation Of Our Culture.

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

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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.

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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.

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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