Top 58 Paul Samuelson Quotes
#1. Econometrics may be defined as the quantitative analysis of actual economic phenomena based on the concurrent development of theory and observation, related by appropriate methods of inference.
Paul Samuelson
#2. Kelsoism is not accepted by modern scientific economics as a valid and fruitful analysis of the distribution of income but rather it is regarded as an amateurish and cranky fad.
Paul Samuelson
#3. What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don't know very much.
Paul Samuelson
#4. When the economy was going up, [Milton Friedman and I] both gave the same advice, and when the economy was going down, we gave the same advice. But in between he didn't change his advice at all.
Paul Samuelson
#5. An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed.
Paul Samuelson
#6. I don't care who writes a nation's laws-or crafts its advanced treaties-if I can write its economics textbooks
Paul Samuelson
#7. I spent the four years I was an undergraduate working on the beach. And it wasn't because I was lazy; it was because my freshman class would go to a hundred different employers and wouldn't get a nibble.
Paul Samuelson
#8. Marshall's crime is to pretend to handle imperfect competition with tools only applicable to perfect competition.
Paul Samuelson
#9. Contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, the Soviet economy is proof that a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.
Paul Samuelson
#10. That's what I would like to do until the end of time, to go on scribbling my articles on the third floor of the Sloan Building, in between playing tennis and drinking coffee at my other study in the Concord Avenue branch of Burger King.
Paul Samuelson
#11. I couldn't reconcile what I was being taught at the university of Chicago, the lectures and the books I was being assigned, with what I knew to be true out in the streets.
Paul Samuelson
#12. The problem is no longer that with every pair of hands that comes into the world there comes a hungry stomach. Rather it is that, attached to those hands are sharp elbows.
Paul Samuelson
#13. Even if this advice to portfolio decision makers to drop dead is good advice, it obviously is not counsel that will be eagerly followed. Few people will commit suicide without a push. And fewer still will pay good money to be told to do what is against human nature and self-interest to do.
Paul Samuelson
#14. Asia's governments come in two broad varieties: young, fragile democracies - and older, fragile authoritarian regimes.
Paul Samuelson
#16. Economists are said to disagree too much but in ways that are too much alike: If eight sleep in the same bed, you can be sure that, like Eskimos, when they turn over, they'll all turn over together.
Paul Samuelson
#17. In this age of specialization, I sometimes think of myself as the last 'generalist' in economics, with interests that range from mathematical economics down to current financial journalism. My real interests are research and teaching ...
Paul Samuelson
#18. Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.
Paul Samuelson
#19. Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear - and what they want to hear is what won't happen.
Paul Samuelson
#20. Economics never was a dismal science. I should be a realistic science.
Paul Samuelson
#21. For better or worse, US Keynesianism was so far ahead of where it started. I am a cafeteria Keynesian. You know what a cafeteria catholic is?
Paul Samuelson
#22. Thousands of important and intelligent men have never been able to grasp the principle of comparative advantage or believe it even after it was explained to them
Paul Samuelson
#23. Self-deception ultimately explains Japan's plight. The Japanese have never accepted that change is in their interest - and not merely a response to U.S. criticism.
Paul Samuelson
#24. Reasonable men are not reasonable when you're in the bubbles which have characterized capitalism since the beginning of time.
Paul Samuelson
#25. Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.
Paul Samuelson
#26. The niceties of existence were not a matter of concern, yet everything around was closed down most of the time. If you lived in a middle-class community in Chicago, children and adults came daily to the door saying, 'We are starving, how about a potato?' I speak from poignant memory.
Paul Samuelson
#27. Anyone with special abilities earns a differential return on that flair, which we economists call a rent. Those few with extraordinary P.Q. (Performance Quotient) will not give away such rent to the Ford Foundation or the local bank trust department. They have too high an I.Q. for that.
Paul Samuelson
#28. What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth ... The Soviet model has surely demonstrated that a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth.
Paul Samuelson
#29. The stock market has predicted nine of the last five recessions.
Paul Samuelson
#31. Globalization presumes sustained economic growth. Otherwise, the process loses its economic benefits and political support.
Paul Samuelson
#32. If we made an income pyramid out of a child's blocks, with each layer portraying $1,000 of income, the peak would be far higher than the Eiffel Tower, but almost all of us would be within a yard of the ground.
Paul Samuelson
#33. You know what happiness is: 'Having a little more money than your colleagues.' And that's not so tough in academic life.
Paul Samuelson
#34. Forsake search for needles that are so very small in haystacks that are so very large.
Paul Samuelson
#35. The sad truth is that it is precisely those who disagree most with the hypothesis of efficient market pricing of stocks, those who pooh-pooh beta analysis and all that, who are least able to understand the analysis needed to test that hypothesis.
Paul Samuelson
#36. It isn't that greed's increased. What's increased is the realization that you've got a free field to reach out for what you'd like to do.
Paul Samuelson
#37. Profits are the lifeblood of the economic system, the magic elixir upon which progress and all good things depend ultimately. But one man's lifeblood is another man's cancer.
Paul Samuelson
#38. Let those who will write the nation's laws, if I can write its textbooks.
Paul Samuelson
#39. First, those who disagree with market efficiency simply assert that it stands to common sense that greater effort to get facts and greater acumen in analyzing those facts will pay off in better performance somehow measured. (By this logic, cure for cancer must have been found by 1955).
Paul Samuelson
#40. Two-thirds of a century after [The Road to Serfdom] got written, hindsight confirms how inaccurate its innuendo about the future turned out to be.
Paul Samuelson
#42. I don't care very much for the People Magazine approach to applied economics.
Paul Samuelson
#43. Two factors explain our success. One, MIT's renaissance after World War II as a federally supported research resource. Two, the mathematical revolution in macro- and micro-economic theory and statistics. This was overdue and inevitable, MIT was the logical place for it to flourish.
Paul Samuelson
#44. I'm not sure most of the people that get caught up in the middle of a bubble can be described as irrational. It seems pretty rational to buy a house and flip it in the next few weeks at a profit when that's been happening for along time.
Paul Samuelson
#45. You could be disqualified for a job [at Harvard] if you were either smart or Jewish or Keynesian. So what chance did this smart, Jewish, Keynesian have?
Paul Samuelson
#46. The growth of a nation's productive potential is the central factor in determining its growth in real wages and living standards ... high rates of investment and saving usually have a big payoff in promoting economic growth.
Paul Samuelson
#47. We're a me-me-me generation. We're borrowing the savings of every nation in the world. We're ... piling up a big tab. Now, I may think we're too big to have a run on us. You may think that. But it's possible that God does not.
Paul Samuelson
#48. Investing is like waiting for paint dry and grass grow so. If you like fun, let handle 800 USD and headed to Las Vegas
Paul Samuelson
#49. Macroeconomics, even with all of our computers and with all of our information. is not an exact science and is incapable of being an exact science.
Paul Samuelson
#50. A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.
Paul Samuelson
#51. It is not easy to get rich in Las Vegas, at Churchill Downs, or at the local Merrill Lynch office.
Paul Samuelson
#52. But the trouble is that he [Alan Greenspan] had been an Ayn Rander. You can take the boy out of the cult but you can't take the cult out of the boy.
Paul Samuelson
#53. We are like highly trained athletes, who never run a race.
Paul Samuelson
#54. Perhaps there really are managers who can outperform the market consistently - logic would suggest that they exist. But they are remarkably well-hidden.
Paul Samuelson
#56. This message (that attempting to beat the market is futile) can never be sold on Wall Street because it is in effect telling stock analysts to drop dead.
Paul Samuelson
#57. Companies are not charitable enterprises: They hire workers to make profits. In the United States, this logic still works. In Europe, it hardly does.
Paul Samuelson
#58. The consumer, so it is said, is the king each is a voter who uses his money as votes to get the things done that he wants done.
Paul Samuelson
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