John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

We propose in the following Treatise to give an outline of the Science which treats of the Nature, the Production, and the Distribution of Wealth. To that Science we give the name of Political Economy.

Economics is not brain surgery.

My job was to teach the whole corpus of economic theory, but there were two subjects in which I was especially interested, namely, the economics of mass unemployment and international economics.

I had become interested in economics, an interest that was transformed into a lifetime dedication when I met with the mathematical theory of general economic equilibrium.

I'm just saying that if you understand how the economic machine works, it just works like a machine. There are cause-effect relationships.

I was an economics major, which I enjoyed because I had a good business sense.

Discovering various economists, economic works, reading financial periodicals and keeping up on current events in geopolitics and economics around the world opened my eyes to many facets of how the extended order works.

Economic science concerns itself primarily with theoretical and empirical generalizations about the behavior of individuals, institutions, markets, and national economies. Most academic research falls in this category.

Keynes was a very good economist. He was brilliant. He had wonderful insights. His work has inspired me many times.

I am an economist, not an astrologer.

The human world lives in a framework called global economics. We live in a system based on GDP, which drives consumption. it causes people to compete with each other through trade in a way that they all grow.

The media simply does not understand Econ 101.

I've been surrounded by some of the best economic minds in the country, and hopefully I've absorbed some of that.

People want to think of economics as a natural science, like physics, with the comforting reliability of simple-to-understand theories like F=MA. Unfortunately, it isn't. Economics is a social science, and the so-called theories are really social and moral constructs.

The study of economics does not seem to require any specialized gifts of an unusually high order.

95% of economics is common sense deliberately made complicated.

Let’s throw the economists out and use common sense instead.

If you think about the amount of critical thinking that has come into the field of economics, two universities have dominated the landscape in my life: Chicago and Harvard.

I have an economics degree from Harvard.

The economy is my wheel house.

The very name of my subject, economics, suggests economizing or maximizing. But Political Economy has gone a long way beyond home economics.

Economics profession, they've been - they've been confident in various formulas, but economics is not physics. The same formula that works in one decade doesn't work in the next. Economics is a difficult subject.

My interest in economics just basically comes because I think I'm a curious person, and I'm interested in how the world works.

When most people think of economists, they think of macro-economists. Macro-economists try to describe or - even harder - predict the movements of a hugely dynamic system. They're like a transplant surgeon trying to simultaneously transplant every failing organ in someone's body.

Traditionally in capitalism, when you have more cash, you can fund more activity, which produces more jobs and creates more wealth. That's basic economic theory.