Paul Samuelson
Economics is not an exact science. It's a combination of an art and elements of science. And that's almost the first and last lesson to be learned about economics: that in my judgment, we are not converging toward exactitude, but we're improving our data bases and our ways of reasoning about them.Collection: Science
I did not throw out my education lightly, but what I was being taught was of no use in explaining what I saw around me. It was the Great Depression.Collection: Education
Good questions outrank easy answers.Collection: Education
The very name of my subject, economics, suggests economizing or maximizing. But Political Economy has gone a long way beyond home economics.Collection: Home
Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.
Economics is a choice between alternatives all the time. Those are the trade-offs.
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.
In well-functioning markets, price equals opportunity cost. Meaning that the proper way to price out and charge us for things is to charge us what those resources could otherwise have produced. This is a lesson the Soviet Union never learned at all, and the rest is history.
I'm not speaking in favor of killing innovation. I'm speaking in favor of centrist use of the market, which involves necessarily a considerable degree of regulation. Markets by themselves will get themselves inevitably into inequality and into their own destruction. It will happen again and again.
Time is our ultimate scarcity. Isaac Newton can give us more electricity, but he can't give us more than 24 hours of the day of time. And so we're constantly having to sacrifice alternate activities to get the one that pleases us most.
To a person of analytical ability, perceptive enough to realise that mathematical equipment was a powerful sword in economics, the world of economics was his or her oyster in 1935. The terrain was strewn with beautiful theorems begging to be picked up and arranged in unified order.
You're not making a decision if you come to a fork in the road. There is no 'it' to take. It's one or the other.
Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear - and what they want to hear is what won't happen.
Every good cause is worth some inefficiency.
I think that it's more important for an economist to be wise and sophisticated in scientific method than it is for a physicist because with controlled laboratory experiments possible, they practically guide you; you couldn't go astray. Whereas in economics, by dogma and misunderstanding, you can go very sadly astray.
Globalization presumes sustained economic growth. Otherwise, the process loses its economic benefits and political support.
An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed.
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.
A temporary reduction in tax rates on individual incomes can be a powerful weapon against recession.
Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.
Keynes's contribution was not just to advocate spending government money in the middle of a recession. Every government had done that going back to the days of the Irish potato famine. What he gave to us was a way of thinking about the magnitude and the dimensions and so forth.
Investing should be dull. It shouldn't be exciting.
Avoiding inflation is not an absolute imperative but rather is one of a number of conflicting goals that we must pursue and that we may often have to compromise.
Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.
In the jargon of American vaudeville, Professors Frisch and Tinbergen are a 'hard act to follow.' But then, all my life, I have been following such great scholars and policy advisors as these.
Asia's governments come in two broad varieties: young, fragile democracies - and older, fragile authoritarian regimes.
What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don't know very much.
My belief is that nothing that can be expressed by mathematics cannot be expressed by careful use of literary words.
I have not been able in one lecture even to scratch the surface of the role of maximum principles in analytic economics.
Companies are not charitable enterprises: They hire workers to make profits. In the United States, this logic still works. In Europe, it hardly does.
'There are no easy pickings.' That would be a more accurate, less dramatic statement than 'There's no such thing as a free lunch.'
What I say is, 'If you're so rich, how come you're so dumb?'
I decided that there was only one place to make money in the mutual fund business, as there is only one place for a temperate man to be in a saloon: behind the bar and not in front of it.
Women are men without money.
Let those who will - write the nation's laws - if I can write its textbooks.
In 1936, money had no important role. Interest rates were one-eighth of one-eighth of one per cent. I did some research, and I found that the interest on one million dollars of ninety-day Treasuries was $37. People didn't even bother to collect it. The Fed wasn't important.
I believe, in the stock market - that's one of my fields - that most people are irrational. And to be irrational, you can be irrational in so many different ways that, practically, the result is indeterminate.
Funeral by funeral, theory advances.
It is not easy to get rich in Las Vegas, at Churchill Downs, or at the local Merrill Lynch office.
Milton Friedman. Friedman had a solid MV = PQ doctrine from which he deviated very little all his life. By the way, he's about as smart a guy as you'll meet. He's as persuasive as you hope not to meet.
My family was well off but not rich. 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. That was a disequilibrium system. I realized that the ordinary old-fashioned Euclidean geometry didn't apply.
I came to the University of Chicago on the morning of January 2, 1932. I wasn't yet a graduate of high school for another few months. And that was about the low point of the Herbert Hoover/Andrew Mellon phase after October of 1929. That's quite a number of years to have inaction.
Things swept so badly that I had distrust - after 1967, let's say - of American Keynesianism. For better or worse, U.S. Keynesianism was so far ahead of where it started. I am a cafeteria Keynesian.
There's nothing in Keynesian economics that would allow you to solve stagflation. But there's nothing in neoclassical economics that would allow you to solve stagflation, either.
It is dead wrong about necessary surplus of winnings over losings.
The remarkable fact is not how much government does to control economic activity, but how much it does not do.
The Keynesian idea is once again accepted that fiscal policy and deficit spending has a major role to play in guiding a market economy. I wish Friedman were still alive so he could witness how his extremism led to the defeat of his own ideas.
Today we see how utterly mistaken was the Milton Friedman notion that a market system can regulate itself... Everyone understands now, on the contrary, that there can be no solution without government.
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.
The history of the twentieth century - America's century! - has been pretty much a history of rising prices.