Paul Samuelson Quotes

51 Sourced Quotes

The recent market run-up that appreciated run-of-the- mill shares also chanced to send up those token gold holdings. Pure luck, undeserved and unlikely to reoccur. Good questions outrank easy answers.

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

Paul Samuelson
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
I return to economics and to economists, and to the question of why the profession's directions have evolved in the manners evident from this book. A major conservative economist once explained that a source of his antipathy to government traced back to the defeat of his southern ancestors by a larger north economy. Here is a similar factoid. Joan Robinson once wrote that her opposition to having the U. K. enter the European Market was due to the fact that she had more friends in [Nehru's] India than on the continent.

Paul Samuelson
I used to joke to Bob Solow that the distance between me and Joan Robinson is less than the distance between Joan Robinson and me. His reply was, You'll never convince her of that. Still on lives in hope.

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

Paul Samuelson
The existence of analogies between central features of various theories implies the existence of a general theory which underlies the particular theories and unifies them with respect to those central features. This fundamental principle of generalization by abstraction was enunicated by the eminent American mathematician E. H. Moore more than thirty years ago. It is the purpose of the pages that follow to work out its implication for theoretical and applied economics.

Paul Samuelson
Figure 12-6 pulls together in a simplified way the main elements of income determination. Without saving and investment, there would be a circular flow of income between business and the public: above, business pays out wages, interest, rents, and profits to the public in return for the services of labor and property; and below, the public pays consumption dollars to business in return for goods and services.
Realistically, we must recognize that the public will wish to save some of its income, as shown at the spigot Z. Hence, businesses cannot expect their consumption sales to be as large as the total of wages, interest, rents, and profits.

Paul Samuelson
Here is my advice. When in doubt, give my new efforts a hearing. Many feel a calling to break new ground; in the end, few will end upfinding their efforts chosen. But the yea-sayer does do less harm than the naysayer, in that the Darwinian process of adverse testing will in time (most likely?) separate the useful from the useless, the trivial from the profound.

Paul Samuelson
Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play.

Paul Samuelson
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
The stock market has forecast nine of the last five recessions.

Paul Samuelson
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.

Paul Samuelson
My mind is ever toying with economic ideas and relationships. Great novelists and poets have reported occasional abandonment by their muse. The well runs dry, permanently or on occasion. Mine has been a better luck. As I have written elsewhere, there is a vast inventory of topics and problems floating in the back of my mind. More perhaps than I shall ever have occasion to write up for publication. A result that I notice in statistical mechanics may someday help resolve a problem in finance.

Paul Samuelson
I can claim that in talking about modern economics I am talking about me. My finger has been in every pie. I once claimed to be the last generalist in economics, writing about and teaching such diverse subjects as international trade and econometrics, economic theory and business cycles, demography and labor economics, finance and monopolistic competition, history of doctrines and locational economics.

Paul Samuelson
What sex is to the biology classroom, stocks and investment riskiness is to the sophomore economics lecture hall.

Paul Samuelson
It is some relief to move from the exalted realm of philosophical ethics to the mundane realm of scientific methodology. However, I rather shy away from discussions of Methodology with a capital M. To paraphrase Shaw: Those who can do science; those who can't prattle about its methodology.

Paul Samuelson
I would guess that most MIT Ph. D.'s since 1980 might deem themselves not to be Keynesians. But they, and modern economists everywhere, do use models like those of Samuelson, Modigliani, Solow, and Tobin. Professor Martin Feldstein, my Harvard neighbor, complained at the 350th Anniversary of Harvard that Keynesians had tried to poison his sophomore mind against saving. Tobin and I on the same panel took this amiss, since both of us since 1955 had been favoring a neoclassical synthesis, in which full employment with an austere fiscal budget would add to capital formation in preparation for a coming demographic turnaround.

Paul Samuelson
What then is it that, since 2007, has caused Wall Street capitalism's own suicide? At the bottom of this worst financial mess in a century is this: Milton Friedman-Friedrich Hayek libertarian laissez-faire capitalism, permitted to run wild without regulation. This is the root source of today's travails. Both of these men are dead, but their poisoned legacies live on.

Paul Samuelson
The very name of my subject, economics, suggests economizing or maximizing. But Political Economy has gone a long way beyond home economics. Indeed, it is only in the last third of the century, within my own lifetime as a scholar, that economic theory has had many pretensions to being itself useful to the practical businessman or bureaucrat. I seem to recall that a great economist of the last generation, A. C. Pigou of Cambridge University, once asked the rhetorical question, Who would ever think of employing an economist to run a brewery? Well, today, under the guise of operational research and managerial economics, the fanciest of our economic tools are being utilized in enterprises both public and private.

Paul Samuelson
Moral: free markets do not stabilize themselves. Zero regulating is vastly suboptimal to rational regulating. Libertarianism is its own worst enemy!

Paul Samuelson
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
What good does it do a black youth to know that an employer must pay him $2 an hour if the fact that he must be paid that amount is what keeps him from getting a job?

Paul Samuelson
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.

Paul Samuelson
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
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.

Paul Samuelson
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
I think Marshall was a great economist, but he was a potentially much greater economist than he actually was. It was not that he was lazy, but his health was not good, and he worked in miniature.

Paul Samuelson
Often I've stated how I hate to be wrong. That has aborted many a tempting error, but not all of them. But I hate much more to stay wrong. Early on, I've learned to check back on earlier proclamations. One can learn much from one's own errors and precious little from one's triumphs. By September of 1945, it was becoming obvious that oversaving was not going to cause a deep and lasting post-war recession. So then and there, I cut my losses on that bad earlier estimate.

Paul Samuelson
Wall Street indexes predicted nine out of the last five recessions.

Paul Samuelson