Faith & Spirit Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith

Economics, Galbraith needles, is forever dressing a moral temperament in a lab coat. The line works because it turns the discipline inside out: beneath the equations and the confident forecasts sits a stew of hope (that markets will self-correct, that growth can be managed) and faith (in models, in rational actors, in the idea that society can be made legible). “Scientific pretension” isn’t an anti-intellectual swipe so much as a jab at the performance of certainty: the charts and jargon that imply physics-like laws when the subject is people, politics, and power.

The kicker is “a deep desire for respectability.” Galbraith understood economics as a status project. The field doesn’t just want to be right; it wants to be taken seriously by governments, financiers, and the wider culture that confers authority. Respectability is the quiet motive that explains why economists often prefer elegant models to messy realities, why they police the boundaries of what counts as “rigorous,” and why dissenting approaches get framed as amateurish or ideological (as if the mainstream isn’t ideological too, just better dressed).

Context matters: Galbraith came of age during the Great Depression, advised in wartime and postwar governance, and watched Keynesian confidence harden into technocratic bravado. He saw economics gain enormous policy influence while repeatedly failing to predict upheavals. This sentence is his reminder that the discipline’s power comes not only from insight, but from its ability to look objective while smuggling in values, anxieties, and aspirations.