"If Walter Bagehot was right that “one of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea,” Ken caused an extraordinary amount of pain. Both in his economic thinking and in his political activities, he was dedicated to resisting, and where possible overturning, what he famously called “conventional wisdom” (one of his many turns of phrase that have since become commonplace locutions). Rejecting the standard economic theory based on small, anonymous households and firms that autonomously engage in perfectly functioning markets, Ken instead saw an economic stage dominated by large, nameable actors: big business, big labor, big government. Sorting out their roles and respective power was central to his analysis, and the continually shifting tensions in the interplay among them—“countervailing power” in another of his deft phrases—was the real story of how an economy behaved."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesAcademics from CanadaEconomists from CanadaUnited States Ambassadors to IndiaEconomists from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Stephen A. Marglin, Richard Parker, Amartya Sen, and Benjamin M. Friedman, “John Kenneth Galbraith”, Harvard Gazette (7 February 2008)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Kenneth_Galbraith
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
John Kenneth Galbraith
1908 – 2006
kanadisch-amerikanischer Ökonom
238 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith →
Related Quotes
"It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immu…"
"Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue."
"Nothing so effectively economizes effort and intelligence, as distinct from anxiety, as the knowledge that nothing ca…"
"When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover. Because ever since t…"
"In the really hard cases you're choosing between the disastrous and the catastrophic, and it's hard to tell someone w…"
"Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not …"
"Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhap…"
"Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result."
"In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that a…"
"You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon."