Paul Samuelson Quotes

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?

Globalization presumes sustained economic growth. Otherwise, the process loses its economic benefits and political support.

You know what happiness is: 'Having a little more money than your colleagues.' And that's not so tough in academic life.

Reasonable men are not reasonable when you're in the bubbles which have characterized capitalism since the beginning of time.

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.

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.

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 ...

Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.

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.

Second, they [those who disagree with market efficiency] always claim they know a man, a bank, or a fund that does do better. Alas, anecdotes are not science. And once Wharton School dissertations seek to quantify the performers, these have a tendency to evaporate into the air - or, at least, into statistically insignificant t-statistics.

Forsake search for needles that are so very small in haystacks that are so very large.

Marshall's crime is to pretend to handle imperfect competition with tools only applicable to perfect competition.

Companies are not charitable enterprises: They hire workers to make profits. In the United States, this logic still works. In Europe, it hardly does.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, the Soviet economy is proof that a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.

Let those who will write the nation's laws, if I can write its textbooks.

Investing is like waiting for paint dry and grass grow so. If you like fun, let handle 800 USD and headed to Las Vegas

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.

To prove that Wall Street is an early omen of movements still to come in GNP, commentators quote economic studies alleging that market downturns predicted four out of the last five recessions. That is an understatement. Wall Street indexes predicted nine out of the last five recessions! And its mistakes were beauties.

Economics never was a dismal science. I should be a realistic science.

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.

By keeping labor supply down, immigration policy tends to keep wages high. Let us underline this basic principle: Limitation of the supply of any grade of labor relative to all other productive factors can be expected to raise its wage rate; and increase in supply will, other things being equal, tend to depress wage rates.

Suppose it was demonstrated that one out of twenty alcoholics could learn to become a moderate social drinker. The experienced clinician would answer, 'Even if true, act as if it were false, for you will never identify that one in twenty, and in the attempt five in twenty will be ruined.' Investors should forsake the search for such tiny needles in huge haystacks.

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.

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.

The stock market has predicted nine of the last five recessions.

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.

Every good cause is worth some inefficiency.

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.

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.

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).

An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed.

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.

Economists have much to be humble about.

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.

Man does not live by GNP alone.

Funeral by funeral, theory advances.

Asia's governments come in two broad varieties: young, fragile democracies - and older, fragile authoritarian regimes.

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.

Even fans of actively managed funds often concede that most other investors would be better off in index funds. But buoyed by abundant self-confidence, these folks aren't about to give up on actively managed funds themselves. A tad delusional? I think so. Picking the best-performing funds is 'like trying to predict the dice before you roll them down the craps table,' says an investment adviser in Boca Raton, FL. 'I can't do it. The public can't do it.'

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.

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.

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

I don't care who writes a nation's laws-or crafts its advanced treaties-if I can write its economics textbooks