Paul Samuelson
U.S. capital formation, which has been pretty high in the '90s and very high in the late 1990s, is what is being financed by the savings of the rest of the world, generally poorer than ourselves, because our deficit on current account, chronic deficit, is their surplus, and they have been willingly bringing that to the American market.
We've become a debtor nation. I don't mean just on fixed-loan terms, but we own increasingly less abroad than is owned from abroad here.
Rent control created deadweight loss.
It is indeed true that the stock market can forecast the business cycle.
I think economics - and this is what I've tried to impart - has a tremendous amount of human interest in it.
Actually, in my advanced, high-falutin' frontier economics, I often work with what I define as 'money metric utility,' and I ask people, 'Do you really want that? What are you willing to pay for that?'
When I was a kid, I reckoned things in Hershey bars. Is this worth three Hershey bars to me?
The Malthusian Theory - that mankind, for biological and sociological reasons, is so fertile, so fecund, that if you started out with the new continent and plenty of land for everybody, in several generations we would multiply our numbers.
Charles Darwin got his theory, his notion of natural selection, evolution, and so did its independent discoverer, Alfred Wallace, from reading Malthus.
I don't care who writes a nation's laws - or crafts its advanced treaties - if I can write its economics textbooks.Collection: Writing
The stock market has predicted nine of the last five recessions.Collection: Nine
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.Collection: Information
There is something in people; you might even call it a little bit of a gambling instinct… I tell people investing should be dull. It shouldn't be exciting. Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.Collection: Vegas
Economics never was a dismal science. It should be a realistic science.Collection: Realistic
Economists have much to be humble about.Collection: Humble
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.Collection: Cancer
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 themCollection: Believe
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.Collection: Philosophy
Reasonable men are not reasonable when you're in the bubbles which have characterized capitalism since the beginning of time.Collection: Men
A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.Collection: Games
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.Collection: Analysis
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.Collection: Wall
In every mutual fund prospectus, in every sales promotional folder, and in every mutual fund advertisement (albeit in print almost too small to read), the following warning appears: "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."Collection: Past
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.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Advice
You know what happiness is: 'Having a little more money than your colleagues.' And that's not so tough in academic life.Collection: Academic Life
Forsake search for needles that are so very small in haystacks that are so very large.Collection: Investing
Investing is like waiting for paint dry and grass grow so. If you like fun, let handle 800 USD and headed to Las VegasCollection: Fun
An American economist of two generations ago, H. J. Davenport, who was the best friend Thorstein Veblen ever had (Veblen actually lived for a time in Davenport's coal cellar) once said: "There is no reason why theoretical economics should be a monopoly of the reactionaries." All my life I have tried to take this warning to heart, and I dare call it to your favorable attention.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Sleep
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.Collection: Wall
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.Collection: Greed
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?Collection: Catholic
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.'Collection: Giving Up
Contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, the Soviet economy is proof that a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.Collection: Economy
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.Collection: Kings
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.Collection: Book
Still, I figure we shouldn't' discourage fans of actively managed funds. With all their buying and selling, active investors ensure the market is reasonably efficient. That makes it possible for the rest of us to do the sensible thing, which is to index. Want to join me in this parasitic behavior? To build a well-diversified portfolio, you might stash 70 percent of your stock portfolio into a Wilshire 5000-index fund and the remaining 30 percent in an international-index fund.Collection: Fans
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.Collection: Tiny
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.Collection: Wisdom
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.Collection: Children
Perhaps there really are managers who can outperform the market consistently - logic would suggest that they exist. But they are remarkably well-hidden.Collection: Investing
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.Collection: People
Marshall's crime is to pretend to handle imperfect competition with tools only applicable to perfect competition.Collection: Perfect
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.Collection: Powerful
We are like highly trained athletes, who never run a race.Collection: Running
The failure of market catallactics in no way denies the following truth: given sufficient knowledge the optimal decisions can always be found by scanning over all the attainable states of the world and selecting the one which according to the postulated ethical welfare function is best. The solution 'exists'; the problem is how to 'find' it.Collection: Decision
Let those who will write the nation's laws, if I can write its textbooks.Collection: Teaching
Man does not live by GNP alone.Collection: Men