Wealth & Money Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith

Galbraith’s line is an economist’s deadpan takedown of an era’s moral alibi. The “doctrine of the eighties” wasn’t just a set of policy preferences; it was a story the decade told about itself to make inequality feel like incentive. If the rich needed more money to “work,” then tax cuts become a productivity program rather than a transfer. If the poor had “too much,” then any safety net can be recast as a sedative, not a stabilizer. He compresses that worldview into a neat inversion: the wealthy portrayed as fragile engines requiring constant lubrication, the poor framed as idle the moment they can breathe.

The specific intent is corrective and caustic. “We can safely abandon” reads like someone closing a file on a failed hypothesis. Galbraith isn’t debating; he’s declaring the experiment over. The subtext is that the behavioral claims underpinning Reagan-era supply-side politics were never empirically sturdy; they were rhetorically useful. It’s also a jab at asymmetry: society’s patience for the rich’s supposed disincentives is infinite, while the poor’s are treated as a crisis.

Context matters. Galbraith came of age in the New Deal and wartime planning, suspicious of markets dressed up as destiny. By the late 20th century, he’d watched “incentives” become a one-way moral language: rewards for capital framed as growth, support for labor framed as decay. The wit works because it’s not a punchline grafted onto numbers; it’s a reversal that exposes how quickly economics becomes etiquette for power.