"If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error"
About this Quote
Immortality, Galbraith suggests, isn’t reserved for the wise; it’s just as available to the catastrophically wrong. The line lands because it weaponizes a familiar human vanity - the desire to be remembered - and flips it into a warning label. “Spectacular error” is doing double duty: it’s funny in the dry, Galbraithian way, but it also names a real mechanism in public life. History has a short memory for competent management and a photographic memory for fiasco.
As an economist who lived through the Great Depression, the postwar boom, and the confident technocracy of the mid-century U.S., Galbraith had watched expertise get treated like a stage prop. The subtext is aimed at elites who chase legacy through grand schemes, sweeping forecasts, and high-stakes policy bets. Quiet correctness rarely makes a story; dramatic failure does. Think of the way financial crises become shorthand for entire eras, while decades of stable growth don’t even get a chapter title.
There’s also a sly jab at the attention economy before we had a name for it. “If all else fails” reads like career advice from hell: when you can’t secure fame by achievement, you can still get it by detonating something large enough that people can’t look away. Galbraith’s cynicism isn’t nihilism; it’s a critique of incentives. When institutions reward audacity and narrative over prudence, error doesn’t just happen - it gets promoted, televised, and eventually memorialized.
As an economist who lived through the Great Depression, the postwar boom, and the confident technocracy of the mid-century U.S., Galbraith had watched expertise get treated like a stage prop. The subtext is aimed at elites who chase legacy through grand schemes, sweeping forecasts, and high-stakes policy bets. Quiet correctness rarely makes a story; dramatic failure does. Think of the way financial crises become shorthand for entire eras, while decades of stable growth don’t even get a chapter title.
There’s also a sly jab at the attention economy before we had a name for it. “If all else fails” reads like career advice from hell: when you can’t secure fame by achievement, you can still get it by detonating something large enough that people can’t look away. Galbraith’s cynicism isn’t nihilism; it’s a critique of incentives. When institutions reward audacity and narrative over prudence, error doesn’t just happen - it gets promoted, televised, and eventually memorialized.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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