One of the little-celebrated powers of Presidents (and other high government officials) is to listen to their critics with just enough sympathy to ensure their silence.
John Kenneth GalbraithRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes that the complexities surrounding money are often used to obscure the truth about its creation and function.
John Kenneth Galbraith highlights the idea that the subject of money within economics is intentionally complex to prevent clear understanding of its true nature. He suggests that while the process by which banks create money is fundamentally simple, the intricacies involved serve to mislead rather than clarify, showing how complexity can act as a barrier to transparency.
Themes
MoneyEconomicsTruthComplexityBanks
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a financial literacy workshop to address the misconceptions about how money works.
More from John Kenneth Galbraith
All quotes →If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
John Kenneth GalbraithRead
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.
John Kenneth GalbraithRead
All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.
John Kenneth GalbraithRead
Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.
John Kenneth GalbraithRead
People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.
John Kenneth GalbraithRead
Similar quotes
Economic policies absorb almost the entire attention of government, and at the same time become ever more impotent. The simplest things, which only fifty years ago one could do without difficulty, cannot get done any more. The richer a society, the more impossible it become to do worthwhile things without immediate payoff.
E. F. SchumacherRead
My premise is not to tax to destroy the wealth of the wealthy; it's to increase the wealth of the bottom and the middle class.
Thomas PikettyRead
Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
Milton FriedmanRead
Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of the people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.
John F. KennedyRead
Global capital markets pose the same kinds of problems that jet planes do. They are faster, more comfortable, and they get you where you are going better. But the crashes are much more spectacular.
Lawrence SummersRead
To a person of analytical ability, perceptive enough to realise that mathematical equipment was a powerful sword in economics, the world of economics was his or her oyster in 1935. The terrain was strewn with beautiful theorems begging to be picked up and arranged in unified order.
Paul SamuelsonRead