“The cliché that by 1929 every one ‘was in the market’ is far from the literal truth…. In later years, a Senate committee investigating the securities market undertook to ascertain the number of people who were involved in securities speculation in 1929. Only one and a half million people out of a population of approximately 120 million…had an active association of any sort with the stock market.”—John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash: 1929
(Today marks the centennial of the birth of economist John Kenneth Galbraith in Iona Station, Ontario, Canada. This year also marks the 50th anniversary of a book whose title became a catchphrase: The Affluent Society. The quote here is an example of how he was unafraid to challenge “conventional wisdom”—another phrase, incidentally, that he popularized.
Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke is supposed to be a noted scholar on the Great Depression. Presumably, he’s boning up on his reading of Galbraith—and the lessons and myths of the Great Crash—right now.)
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