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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.

-John Kenneth Galbraith

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Over The Span Of

John Kenneth Galbraith

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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.

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Total Physical And Mental Inertia Are Highly Agreeable, Much More So Than We Allow Ourselves To Imagine. A Beach Not Only Permits Such Inertia But Enforces It, Thus Neatly Eliminating All Problems Of Guilt. It Is Now The Only Place In Our Overly Active World That Does.

Any Consideration Of The Life And Larger Social Existence Of The Modern Corporate Man Begins And Also Largely Ends With The Effect Of One All-embracing Force. That Is Organization - The Highly Structured Assemblage Of Men, And Now Some Women, Of Which He Is A Part. It Is To This, At The Expense Of Family, Friends, Sex, Recreation And Sometimes Health And Effective Control Of Alcoholic Intake, That He Is Expected To Devote His Energies.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Federal Reserve

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Private Enterprise Did Not Get Us Atomic Energy.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The 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.

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.

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.

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.

Simple Minds, Presumably, Are The Easiest To Manage.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 More Underdeveloped The Country, The More Overdeveloped The Women.

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.

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

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

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.

Increasingly In Recent Times We Have Come First To Identify The Remedy That Is Most Agreeable, Most Convenient, Most In Accord With Major Pecuniary Or Political Interest, The One That Reflects Our Available Faculty For Action; Then We Move From The Remedy So Available Or Desired Back To A Cause To Which That Remedy Is Relevant.

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.

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

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.

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.

I'm Certainly Going To Support Al Gore Because, On The Whole, He's The More Sensible Figure And You Vote Not For The Perfect But For The Best. Coupled With That Is A Special Situation.

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

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

We're All Subject To The Daily Pressures Of Consumer Persuasion.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Survival Of The Fittest

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

In 1736, Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette Printed An Apology For Its Irregular Appearence Because Its Printer Was "with The Press, Labouring For The Publick Good, To Make Money More Plentiful." The Press Was Busy Printing Money.

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

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

American Universities

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 First Goal Of The Technostructure Is Its Own Security.

In The Market Economy The Price That Is Offered Is Counted Upon To Produce The Result That Is Sought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Do The Best With What Exists.

We Have A Swarm Of People In The Stock Market - Not Out Of Knowledge, Not Out Of Expectation, But Out Of Basically A Gambling Instinct, The Hope That Prices Will Go Up.

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

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

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

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

Happiness Does Not Require An Expanding Economy

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Ideas Do Not Respect National Frontiers, And This Is Especially So Where Language And Other Traditions Are In Common.

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

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.

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.

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

It Is In The Long Run That The Corporation Lives.

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.

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

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

Great Depression

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

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

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

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.

Genius Is A Rising Stock Market.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

Modesty Is A Vastly Overrated Virtue.

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

I 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.

With The American Failure Came World Failure.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Few Economic Problems, If Any, Are Difficult Of Solution. The Difficulty, All But Invariably, Is In Confronting Them. We Know What Needs To Be Done; For Reasons Of Inertia, Pecuniary Interest, Passion Or Ignorance, We Do Not Wish To Say So.

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.

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.

Economics Exists To Make Astrology Look Respectable.

Nothing So Weakens Government As Persistent Inflation.

Economists Are Generally Negligent Of Their Heroes.

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.

We Have Escapist Fiction, So Why Not Escapist Biography?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Nothing Is More Portable Than Rich People And Their Money

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.

The Conspicuously Wealthy Turn Up Urging The Character Building Values Of The Privation Of The Poor.

No Ethic Is As Ethical As The Work Ethic.

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.

Conscience Is Better Served By A Myth.

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.

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

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

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

[the] Men Of The Technostructure Are The New And Universal Priesthood. Their Religion Is Business Success; Their Test Of Virtue Is Growth And Profit. Their Bible Is The Computer Printout; Their Communion Bench Is The Committee Room.

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.

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.

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

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