In over 700 posts, not once did I refer to the economist who had the greatest impact on me in my college years and long afterwards : Canadian-American John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 - 2006), one of the few economists who wrote down their ideas without formulas and in plain English - he thus was contrarian enough never to be awarded the Nobel price for economics (which is a fake Nobel price anyway).°°°
Some quotes from the master :
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.
The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.
Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
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.
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
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