John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes About Economics
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Agriculture is one economic activity that does not obey the laws of demand and supply.
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In economics it is a far, far wiser thing to be right than to be consistent
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I've been a faithful reader of the great classical documents of economics, or tried to be.
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Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
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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. . .
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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.
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It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.
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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.
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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.
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If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to "trickle down" economics).
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The fully planned economy, so far from being unpopular, is warmly regarded by those who know it best.
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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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The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled.
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In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
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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.
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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.
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The attraction of power we take for granted in politics.. But in economics...the thrust...is for pecuniary return, for money. And I have always felt that denies in the economic world a very large part of the motivation.
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Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
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One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
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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.
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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.
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The problem of the modern economy is not a failure of a knowledge of economics; it's a failure of a knowledge of history.
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If anything is evident about people who manage money, it is that the task attracts a very low level of talent, one that is protected in its highly imperfect profession by the mystery that is thought to enfold the subject of economics in general and of money in particular.
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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.
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Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
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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.
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The questions that are beyond the reach of economics-the beauty, dignity, pleasure and durability of life-may be inconvenient but they are important.
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Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study.
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Happiness does not require an expanding economy
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Economics exists to make astrology look respectable.
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