Politics & Power Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith

Galbraith skewers economics with the kind of patrician mischief only an economist-turned-public intellectual could pull off: he indicts his own discipline not for being hard, but for being dull in a way that invites dishonesty. "Profoundly conducive to cliche" is the giveaway. He is not merely complaining about jargon; he is pointing to how economic talk, once routinized into slogans, becomes a social permission slip to stop thinking. The boredom is functional. It creates a low-attention environment where tidy truisms ("tighten our belts", "the market will fix it") can pass for analysis and where power can hide inside platitudes.

The American audience he describes is "practiced" at tuning out, as if civic disengagement is a learned skill. That word choice matters: it suggests repetition, media habit, and political conditioning. Economics arrives to most people as scolding or mystification, either a sermon about personal responsibility or an opaque math-fog that discourages questions. Galbraith, who spent his career arguing that corporate power, advertising, and public policy shape "the market" as much as any invisible hand, is also taking aim at the profession's rhetorical safety. Cliche is how orthodoxy protects itself.

The sting is the last line: the public's shutdown is "not ill advised". That's not contempt for ordinary people; it's a backhanded critique of economists who often deserve skepticism. If the field keeps selling certainty packaged as inevitability, refusing it becomes a rational defense. Galbraith is urging readers to hear the boredom as a warning signal: whenever economics sounds like a lullaby, someone may be slipping policy past you.