John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

While it will be desirable to achieve planned results, it will be even more important to avoid unplanned disasters.

Even the economist, who most takes for granted the primacy of pecuniary motivation, looks askance at the colleague who is too avid for consulting fees from corporations or textbook revenues or travel at the expense of the Ford Foundation. Academic courtesy may require that he refrain from first-person comment but duty dictates that he be vigorously critical of the transgressor when the latter is absent.

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.

That one never need to look beyond the love of money for explanation of human behavior is one of the most jealously guarded simplifications of our culture.

Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study.

The power of the market, which is the fulcrum of traditional attitudes, depends on the validity of this assumption. It is a far, far better thing to admit to monopoly profits, even at exploitive levels, than to concede that the market is impotent.

Men are, in fact, either sustained by organization or they sustain organization.

Because individuals have more standing in the culture than organizations, they regularly get credit for achievement that belongs, in fact, to organization.

Nothing so effectively economizes effort and intelligence, as distinct from anxiety, as the knowledge that nothing can be done.

The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning.

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.

The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.

We may lay it down as a rule that the older the exercise of any power, the more benign it will appear, and the more recent its assumption, the more unnatural and even dangerous it will seem.

In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.

The individual serves the planning system not by supplying it with savings and the resulting capital; he serves it far more by consuming its products. On no other activity, religious, political or moral, is he so elaborately, skillfully and expensively instructed.