Daily Inspiration Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith

Galbraith is skewering a stubborn moral tic in capitalist societies: the need to retrofit pain with purpose. He sets the trap with “Few can believe,” a cool, almost anthropological phrasing that makes the reader complicit in the very instinct he’s about to ridicule. The first clause isn’t about empathy so much as self-exoneration. If other people’s suffering is “not in vain,” then we don’t have to treat it as an indictment of the system; we can treat it as a down payment on progress.

The second sentence sharpens into deadpan satire. “Anything that is disagreeable” is deliberately broad, bordering on childish, because the logic he’s mocking is similarly blunt: discomfort equals growth, hardship equals efficiency, crisis equals “opportunity.” Galbraith is aiming at the reflexive economic theology that turns unemployment, austerity, and social dislocation into good news for “the economy” in the abstract. Note the sly move: he doesn’t claim people are cruel; he claims they are comforted by an economic story that redeems cruelty.

Context matters: Galbraith wrote as a public economist in the postwar era, when prosperity coexisted with deep inequality and when “creative destruction” was becoming a kind of secular catechism. His target is the rhetorical alchemy that converts human costs into GDP footnotes. The subtext is accusatory: if you’re eager to find “beneficial economic effects” in someone else’s misery, the benefit is also psychological. It lets you stay seated while calling it realism.