John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

The first goal of the technostructure is its own security.

More generally, the individual who gets added income as a result of a general inflationary movement atributes it not to larger economic causes but to his own virtue and diligence.

Should there be sacrifice, as always in the mature corporation, it is not suffered by those who agree to it.

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.

To add to the technostructure is to increase its power in the enterprise.

Those who yearn for the defeat of their enemy are said to wish that he might write a book.

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.

That one’s personal reactions signify the public reaction is not, scientifically, a defensible proposition but where the preservation of precious intellectual capital is involved, scientific method is readily sacrificed.

It is not the individual's right to buy that is being protected. Rather, it is the seller's right to manage the individual.

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.

It is a well-established, though perhaps somewhat transparent, technique of argument, on encountering something which cannot easily be reconciled with preferred belief, to point to the exceptions. What does not invariably exist is then held not to exit.

The latter situation, that of the monopolists, is the apogee of improper influence. In the English language only a few words — fraud, subversion, sodomy — have a greater connotation of nonviolent wickedness.

For thousands of reluctant scholars, a few distantly remembered curves depicting the interaction of supply and demand to establish prices have for long been the only permanent return on an investment in economic education.

Oligopoly is an imperfect monopoly. Like the despotism of the Dual Monarchy, it is saved only by its incompetence.

If he suspects that economics, as it is conventionally taught, is, in part, a system of belief designed less to reveal truth than to reassure students and other communicants as to the benign tendency of established social arrangements, he will also be right.