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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.

-John Kenneth Galbraith

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People Are The Common

John Kenneth Galbraith

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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.

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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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The Notion Of A Formal Structure Of Command Must Be Abandoned. It Is More Useful To Think Of The Mature Corporation As A Series Of Concentric Circles.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

It Is In The Long Run That The Corporation Lives.

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.

Talk Of Revolution Is One Of Avoiding Reality.

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.

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.

When You See Reference To A New Paradigm You Should Always, Under All Circumstances, Take Cover.

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

It Is The Good Fortune Of The Affluent Country That The Opportunity Cost Of Economic Discussion Is Low And Hence It Can Afford All Kinds.

Almost Every Aspect Of Its (federal Reserve) History Should Be Approached With A Discriminating Disregard For What Is Commonly Taught Or Believed.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 Never Enjoyed Writing A Book More; Indeed, It Is The Only One I Remember In No Sense As A Labor But As A Joy.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Technology Means The Systematic Application Of Scientific Or Other Organized Knowledge To Practical Tasks.

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.

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.

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

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

Some Things Were Never Meant To Be Recycled.

Some Things Are Meant To Be

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.

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

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.

One Of The Little-celebrated Powers Of Presidents (and Other High Government Officials) Is To Listen To Their Critics With Just Enough Sympathy To Ensure Their Silence.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

In Recent Times No Problem Has Been More Puzzling To Thoughtful People Than Why, In A Troubled World, We Make Such Poor Use Of Our Affluence.

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

Money Is A Singular Thing. It Ranks With Love As Man's Greatest Source Of Joy. And With Death As His Greatest Source Of Anxiety. Over All History It Has Oppressed Nearly All People In One Of Two Ways: Either It Has Been Abundant And Very Unreliable, Or Reliable And Very Scarce.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Modesty Is A Vastly Overrated Virtue.

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

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.

There Can Be No Question, However, That Prolonged Commitment To Mathematical Exercises In Economics Can Be Damaging. It Leads To The Atrophy Of Judgement And Intuition. . .

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.

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.

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

Federal Reserve

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

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

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

Survival Of The Fittest

Conscience Is Better Served By A Myth.

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.

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

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

We Have Escapist Fiction, So Why Not Escapist Biography?

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

From The Fact Of General Well-being Came The New Position Of The Poor. They Were Now In Most Communities A Minority. The Voice Of The People Was Now The Voice Of Relative Affluence. Politicians In Pursuit Of Votes Could Be Expected To Have A Diminishing Concern For The Very Poor. Compassion Would Have To Serve Instead - An Uncertain Substitute.

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

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

Imperfect Things

Power Is As Power Does.

Why Is Anything Intrinsically So Valueless So Obviously Desirable?

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

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.

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

The 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The 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.

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.

I've Been A Faithful Reader Of The Great Classical Documents Of Economics, Or Tried To Be. The First Book In The Field That I Ever Read Was Principles Of Economics By Alfred Marshall. I Suppose Subsequently I Would Have To Pick Out Keynes, Adam Smith, Marx.

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

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 Fact, The Wage-price Spiral Is The Functional Counterpart Of Unemployment. The Latter Occurs When There Is Insufficient Demand; The Spiral Operates When There Is Too Much And Also,unfortunately, When There Is Just Enough.

There 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Genius Is A Rising Stock Market.

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.

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.

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.

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.

With The American Failure Came World Failure.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

No Ethic Is As Ethical As The Work Ethic.

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

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.

Faced With Having To Change Our Views Or Prove That There Is No Need To Do So, Most Of Us Immediately Get Busy On The Proof.

I Do The Best With What Exists.

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

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

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

It Is A Far, Far Better Thing To Have A Firm Anchor In Nonsense Than To Put Out On The Troubled Seas Of Thought.

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

All Of The Great Leaders Have Had One Characteristic In Common: It Was The Willingness To Confront Unequivocally The Major Anxiety Of Their People In Their Time. This, And Not Much Else, Is The Essence Of Leadership.

Consumer Wants Can Have Bizarre, Frivolous, Or Even Immoral Origins, And An Admirable Case Can Still Be Made For A Society That Seeks To Satisfy Them. But The Case Cannot Stand If It Is The Process Of Satisfying Wants That Create The Wants.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

Simple Minds, Presumably, Are The Easiest To Manage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economics Exists To Make Astrology Look Respectable.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The Spirit Should Never Grow Old.

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