Daily Inspiration Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith

Galbraith’s line lands like a cocktail-party provocation, but it’s really an economist’s jab at the moral comfort people take in crowds. “The majority” is doing double duty here: it’s voters, consumers, pundits, and the investment herd all at once. In markets, the collective can look like wisdom; Galbraith reminds you it often looks like a bubble.

The specific intent is corrective and slightly scolding. Economics, in the popular imagination, flatters democratic instincts: if everyone wants it, buys it, believes it, surely it must be right. Galbraith flips that. His subtext is that mass agreement is frequently a lagging indicator, not a leading one. By the time an idea is majority property, it’s already been priced in, institutionalized, and often stripped of its edge. The minority, in this framing, is where the unglamorous early signals live.

It also reads as a critique of “conventional wisdom,” a phrase Galbraith made famous: the socially convenient beliefs that protect reputations more than they predict reality. Majorities don’t just form; they get manufactured through incentives, careerism, media repetition, and the soothing desire to be on the safe side of consensus.

Context matters: Galbraith wrote in a 20th century defined by booms, busts, and policy fads, when Keynesian triumphalism, postwar corporate power, and later market fundamentalism each took turns being the sensible center. His point isn’t that minorities are automatically right. It’s that economics punishes comfort, and consensus is comfort with a headcount.