Words matter. These are the best Paul Samuelson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Investing should be dull. It shouldn’t be exciting.
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’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.
The remarkable fact is not how much government does to control economic activity, but how much it does not do.
One of the pleasing things about science is that we do all climb towards the heavens on the shoulders of our predecessors. Economics, like physics, has its heroes, and the letter ‘H’ that I used in my mathematical equations was not there to honor Sir William Hamilton, but rather Harold Hotelling.
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.
I can’t think of a president who has been overburdened by a knowledge of economics.
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.
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.
People had J.F.K. all wrong. They thought of him as a dashing, deciding type. He was an extremely hesitant person who checked the ice in front of him all the time.
I think economics – and this is what I’ve tried to impart – has a tremendous amount of human interest in it.
The very name of my subject, economics, suggests economizing or maximizing. But Political Economy has gone a long way beyond home economics.
When I was a kid, I reckoned things in Hershey bars. Is this worth three Hershey bars to me?
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.
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.
Charles Darwin got his theory, his notion of natural selection, evolution, and so did its independent discoverer, Alfred Wallace, from reading Malthus.
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.
‘There are no easy pickings.’ That would be a more accurate, less dramatic statement than ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch.’
Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It’s an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.
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.
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.
A temporary reduction in tax rates on individual incomes can be a powerful weapon against recession.
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.
American society was economically ill-run in the 1980s. Our society has been on a consumption binge. If the American people had a town meeting and said, ‘What do we care about posterity? Posterity hasn’t done anything for us; we’re going to whoop it up now,’ that is a rational judgment. But nobody ever did that.
Rent control created deadweight loss.
It is not easy to get rich in Las Vegas, at Churchill Downs, or at the local Merrill Lynch office.
Often, when I became a consultant to a federal agency, that precipitated its demise.
Let me acknowledge that I realize that, in honoring me, the Committee of the Royal Academy of Sciences is in fact saying a good word for all of those of my generation who have been laboring in the same vineyard.
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.
It is indeed true that the stock market can forecast the business cycle.
