Art & Creativity Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith

Galbraith frames the bad book as a moral agent without the one human escape hatch: remorse. That first clause lands like a Calvinist punchline - not just that bad writing is harmful, but that its harm is fixed, repeatable, and immune to self-correction. People can apologize; texts can only persist. The joke is dark, but the target is serious: print (and by extension, mass media) freezes error into something portable.

Then comes the sharper turn: ignorance isn’t the enemy; corruption is. Galbraith rejects the melodrama that elites or villains succeed by keeping people uneducated. The masses will read anyway. So the more efficient tactic is to flood the channel with attractive toxins - books that feel like knowledge while delivering distortion. The devil here isn’t a literal theology so much as a satirical stand-in for incentives: publishers chasing sensation, propagandists laundering ideology into “common sense,” tastemakers selling certainty.

The subtext is a warning about how literacy can be neutralized. Reading, in this view, isn’t automatically emancipatory; it’s only as good as the intellectual hygiene of what’s being consumed. For an economist who spent his career dissecting corporate power, consumer persuasion, and the manufactured wants of affluent societies, the metaphor tracks: markets don’t just allocate goods, they manufacture preferences. “Poison their books” is the cultural wing of the same critique - when attention is abundant, the bottleneck is judgment, and bad books exploit that scarcity relentlessly.