Aging & Wisdom Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith

Galbraith opens with a sly throat-clearing: “By all but the pathologically romantic” is less a qualifier than a jab. He’s carving out a category of dissenters - not principled opponents, but sentimental holdouts clinging to a comforting myth. In one phrase he frames nostalgia as a kind of illness, then moves in for the larger claim: the era of the “small man” is over.

The line lands because it reverses a cherished democratic self-image. We like stories where history is steered by plucky individuals, tidy moral agency, the corner-shop owner and the self-made striver. Galbraith, the economist of bigness, is saying the operative unit of modern life is no longer the individual but the institution: the corporation, the bureaucratic state, the military-industrial apparatus, the organized economy. “Recognized” signals that this isn’t a preference, it’s a diagnosis - the grown-ups have already done the math.

Context matters: mid-century America, postwar consolidation, managerial capitalism, the rise of technocracy. Galbraith’s work repeatedly argues that power has migrated upward into systems that can plan, price, lobby, and manufacture consent. The subtext is both descriptive and accusatory. If you keep talking like a “small man” politics still fits - rugged individualism, moral exhortation, personal thrift - you’ll misread the sources of prosperity and the machinery of inequality.

The sting is that “romance” here isn’t love; it’s civic fantasy. Galbraith isn’t mocking hope so much as warning that in an age of large-scale forces, private virtue alone is an inadequate tool for public problems.