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Paul Samuelson

95 quotes

• “The General Theory caught most economists under the age of 35 with the unexpected virulence of a disease first attacking and decimating an isolated tribe of south sea islanders. Economists beyond 50 turned out to be quite immune to the ailment. With time, most economists in between began to run the fever, often without knowing or admitting their condition.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Lord Keynes and the General Theory", Econometrica (1946)

• “Science is not art. Yet, despite the lack of complete identity between art and science, there is much in common among different creative processes.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Just as Hegel is said to have understood his philosophy for the first time when he read its French translation, Vilfredo Pareto could have learned what it was he meant exactly to say when he read Bergson's 1938 classic.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I was lucky to enter economics in 1932. Analytical economics was poised for its take-off. I faced a lovely vacuum that young economists today can hardly imagine. So much remained to be done. Everything was still in an imperfect state. It was like fishing in a virgin lake: a whopper at every cast, but so many lovely new specimens that the palate never cloyed.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1915–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The general method involved may be very simply stated. In cases where the equilibrium values of our variables can be regarded as the solutions of an extremum (maximum or minimum) problem, it is often possible regardless of the number of variables involved to determine unambiguously the qualitative behavior of our solution values in respect to changes of parameters.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I think the acceptance of "mathematical expectation of utility" or its "arithmetic mean" was an unthinking carryover from the mathematical theory of the law of large numbers as applied to asymptotic processes.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Probability and the Attempts to Measure Utility", The Economic Review (July 1950)

• “Needless to say, the partial equilibrium assumptions involved in the domestic demand schedules and the neglect of aggregative relations constitute a serious defect of such a model except as a rough first approximation to the answers in especially favorable cases. Good economic theory will recognize these limitations rather than be predisposed to neglect them.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1952 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Spatial Price Equilibrium and Linear Programming", The American Economic Review (June 1952)

• “Dynamic process analysis also liberates economists from the necessity of having separate theories of the “turning-points” in addition to theories of cumulative upward and downward swings. Even a simple theory of inventory cycles, or acceleration-multipliers, can explain all four phases of an idealized cycle. At its best, dynamic analysis can enrich our understanding of possibilities without leading to credulity in new, over-narrow, monistic dogmas concerning the cyclical process.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1952 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Dynamic Process Analysis", in Howard Ellis (ed.), A Survey of Contemporary Economics (1952)

• “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 (1915–2009) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Paul Samuelson, Tjalling Koopmans, and Richard Stone. "Report of the evaluative committee for Econometrica." Econometrica- journal of the Econometric Society. (1954): 141-146.

  Also quoted by: Richard Stone, Tjalling Koopmans

• “Marx did do original work in analyzing patterns of circular inter-dependency among industries. Such work gains few converts and is not very helpful in promoting revolution or counterreactions. But like all pioneering effort it deserves the commendation of later craftmen, and it deserves further development. There is half-truth in Schumpeter's adaption of Clemenceau: "Marxian economics is too hard to be left to the Marxians." Only half, because the present paper is seen to involve little worse than school algebra and to be well within the frontier of modern economic theory.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Wage and Interest: A Modern Dissection of Marxian Economic Models", The American Economic Review (December 1957)

• “Remember that our goal is not the abolition of all business cycles--even if that were feasible, it might not be desirable. Instead we aim to wopie out persistent slump or unsought inflation. If only capitalism had succeeded in the past in this more modest goal, how different would have been the course of human history!”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: What Economists Know", in Daniel Lerner (ed.), The Human Meaning of the Social Sciences (1959)

• “As old problems are conquered, we expect to turn up new problems. A discipline lives on its unsolvved problems; and so, for better or worse, economics is likely to be a lively subject for as many years ahead as man can see.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: What Economists Know", in Daniel Lerner (ed.), The Human Meaning of the Social Sciences (1959)

• “Economic theory is a mistress of even too tempting grace.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Problems of The American Economy: An Economist's View", Stamp Memorial Lectures (1962)

• “In every actuarial situation of mathematical probability, no matter how large the numbers in the sample, we are left with a finite sample: in the appropriate limit law of probability there will necessarily be left an epsilon of uncertainty even in so-called risk situations.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Risk and Uncertainty: A Fallacy of Large Numbers" Scientia (April-May 1963)

• “And make no mistake about it: Smith was right. Most of the interventions into economic life by the State were then harmful both to prosperity and freedom. What Smith said needed to be said. In fact, much of what Smith said still needs to be said: good intentions by government are not enough; acts do have consequences that had better be taken into account if good is to follow.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Modern Economic Realities and Individualism", The Texas Quarterly (1963)

• “Libertarians fail to realize that the price system is, and ought to be, a method of coercion. Nature is not so bountiful as to give each of us all the goods he desires. We have, by the nature of things, to be coerced out of such an expectation. That is why we have policemen and courts. That is why we charge prices which are high enough relative to limited money, to limit consumption.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Modern Economic Realities and Individualism", The Texas Quarterly (1963)

• “Before Rousseau, people made the mistake of treating children as merely adults shrunk small. The Bible and Freud go farther and tell us that an adult is merely a child grown large. Man is imperfect, and so is woman. And so is We, Incorporated, who paternalistically put restraints upon ourselves. Not even an individual's perfections are his alone; like his imperfections, they are group-made. We entered a world we never made, and leave one we did not unmake.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Modern Economic Realities and Individualism", The Texas Quarterly (1963)

• “Carry the notion of the individual to its limit and you get a monstrosity, just as you do if you carry the notion of a group to its limit.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Modern Economic Realities and Individualism", The Texas Quarterly (1963)

• “The stock market has forecast nine of the last five recessions.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Samuelson, Paul (September 19, 1966). "Science and Stocks". Newsweek. p. 92.

• “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 (1915–2009) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Maximum Principles in Analytical Economics," Prize Lecture, Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 11, 1970

• “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 one lives in hope.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: letter to Joan Robinson (April 14, 1972) quoted in Marjorie Shepherd Turner, Joan Robinson and the Americans (1989)

• “Inside every classical economist is a modem economist trying to get out. In rereading the Wealth of Nation is, it seems to me that with a little midwifery sleight of hand, one can extract from Adam Smith a valuable model that vindicates him from criticisms of Ricardo and Marx and from the general supercilious discounting of Smith as an unoriginal theorist who is logically fuzzy and eclectically empty.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: A Modern Theorist's Vindication of Adam Smith", The American Economic Review, Vol. 67, No. 1, Papers and Proceedings of the Eighty-ninth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Assocation (Feb., 1977)

• “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 (1915–2009) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Gold and Common Stocks", Newsweek (21 August 1978)

• “Mathematics is the handmaiden of the sciences. But mathematics also has a life of her own, gaining as much in her own development and fulfillment from the sciences as she gives to them. To help describe how apples and planets fall, and how ropes hang, Newton and Leibniz developed the calculus. By serendipity, that mode of analysis permitted economists to perfect the theory of general equilibrium two centuries later.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Foreword to Theory of Technical Change and Economic Invariance: Application to Lie Groups, by Ryuzo Sato (1981)

• “After 1929 it was the sturdy middle classes, and not just the lumpen proletariat, who were down and out. It was not all that unfashionable or disreputable to be bankrupt. By the last Hoover years, the states and localities had run out of money for relief. In middle-class neighborhoods like mine, you constantly had children at the door, asking by mouth or with a note for a dime, a quarter, or a potato: saying, in a believable fashion, we are starving.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Succumbing to Keynesianism", Challenge (1985)

• “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 (1915–2009) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: February 1985, in William Breit and Roger W. Spencer (ed.) Lives of the laureates (5th ed., 2009)

• “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 (1915–2009) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: February 1985, in William Breit and Roger W. Spencer (ed.) Lives of the laureates (5th ed., 2009)

• “The museums of science are replete with fossils of species that could not last the course. The leading-coinciding-lagging indicators might be buried forever in old footnotes. But occasionally Sleeping Beauty is brought back to life by the kiss of a new Prince Charming.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Paradise Lost & Refound: The Harvard ABC Barometers", The Journal of Portfolio Management, 13(3), 4-9, 1987

• “What is truly discouraging — or reassuring? — is the considerable evidence that the universe of those who seek to be "timers," and vary the fractional shares of their portfolios committed to common stocks in the hope of enlarging average long-term total return, in fact fail to achieve on the average any plus gain in comparison with simply buying and holding a fixed fraction of common stocks.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Paradise Lost & Refound: The Harvard ABC Barometers", The Journal of Portfolio Management, 13(3), 4-9, 1987

• “The goals, methods, and strategies of what borders on science is different from the gyration of fashion and the incommensurability of arts and music in different epochs. Because this different process of cumulative science is imperfect, historians and philosophers of science intermittently downplay this difference.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Keeping Whig History Honest", History of Economics Society Bulletin, 10(2), 161-167, 1988.

• “The moral I take to be this. The virtues of alternative modern paradigms in science have to be evaluated in modern times and with modern methods. Until one schemata comes to dominate the other, Whig Historians will have interest in a diversified portfolio of archeological researches. As one paradigm loses out in the Darwinian jungle of science, what survives competitively in the agenda for dogmengeschicte cannot help but be altered.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Keeping Whig History Honest", History of Economics Society Bulletin, 10(2), 161-167, 1988.

• “There were many Moliére characters speaking Keynesian prose in the depression years before 1936. What Keynes’s General Theory gave us, which Ohlin’s inspired journalisms could not at all offer, was a new manageable paradigm that we could explicitly express — and test, and criticize, and improve, ... , and be bewitched by. Long before Kuhn, Schumpeter used to insist that old theories are not killed by simple facts: It takes a new theory to kill an old one. The mind cannot operate in terms of a melange of sensations. It needs a road map to perceive patterns of regularity and persistence.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Thoughts on the Stockholm School and on Scandinavian Economics" in L. Jonung (ed.), The Stockholm School of Economics Revisited (1991)

• “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 (1915–2009) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: My Life Philosophy: Policy Credos and Working Ways,” in M. Szenberg (ed.) Eminent Economists: Their Life Philosophies (1992)

• “A scientist earns the only mortality worth having. Of the good scholar we say: Rex numquam moritur.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Foreword to H. Herberg and N. Van Long (eds.) Trade, Welfare, and Economic Policies, Essays in Honor of Murray C. Kemp (1993)

• “I will not waste ink on face-saving tautologies. When the governess of infants caught in a burning building reenters it unobserved in a hopeless mission of rescue, casuists may argue; "She did it only to get the good feeling of doing it. Because otherwise she wouldn't have done it." Such argumentation (in Wolfgang Pauli's scathing phrase) is not even wrong. It is just boring, irrelevant, and in the technical sense of old-fashioned logical positivism "meaningless.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Altruism as a Problem Involving Group versus Individual Selection in Economics and Biology", American Economic Review, 83(2) 143-148, 1993

• “Orthodox biologists are like orthodox economists. When confronted by tensions between their paradigms and reality, they work to explain away the aberrations.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Altruism as a Problem Involving Group versus Individual Selection in Economics and Biology", American Economic Review, 83(2) 143-148, 1993

• “Darwin's evolution is indeed mere sound and fury, signifying nothing normative, rather than denoting a process of meaningful Spencerian triumph. Natural selection is not an empty tautology about survival of those who survive. It is a lawful process subject to shrewd predictions and testable refutations. But in general it does not act to maximize any scalar magnitude. Many of its subprocesses do eschew submaximal configurations, and some may approximate efficiency criteria, but the resultant of them all is only positivistic!”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Altruism as a Problem Involving Group versus Individual Selection in Economics and Biology", American Economic Review, 83(2) 143-148, 1993

• “Social Darwinism is a perverted borrowing from what can be validly established for biology. When I contemplate strong claims by a Richard Posner that law has evolved historically a la Pareto, or arguments that a Coase Theorem ensures that deadweight loss is at its feasible minimum, I fear that von Neumann and Morgenstern are spinning in their graves and Charles Darwin is wondering why he left his barnacles, pigeons, and earthworms. An unsupported claim by an economist- Darwinist does not acquire validity from a cited analogy with evolution. Truth must find its own legs to stand on.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Altruism as a Problem Involving Group versus Individual Selection in Economics and Biology", American Economic Review, 83(2) 143-148, 1993

• “Error is a virus that tends to spread. As I have already hinted, the categories of circulating capital and of the wage fund tended and still tend to get confounded together.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Classical Classical Fallacy", Journal of Economic Literature, 32(2), 620-639, 1994.

• “Economics, even classical economics, is not a finished business. There are still issues relevant to the present debate that have not been definitively explored.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Classical Classical Fallacy", Journal of Economic Literature, 32(2), 620-639, 1994.

• “The vogue of vulgar and vague Coaseism, one hypothesizes, is strongest among libertarians and other devotees of laissez-faire who believe to find in it ammunition against regulation and voters' activism. Whether this hypothesis is close to or wide off the mark is of no importance. What does matter is how much deadweight-loss obtains in real life.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Some uneasiness with the Coase Theorem", Japan and the World Economy 7 (1995)

• “What sex is to the biology classroom, stocks and investment riskiness is to the sophomore economics lecture hall.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Samuelson's Economics at Fifty: Remarks on the Occasion of the Anniversary of Publication" (1998)

• “I tell no secret when I repeat that fame and reputation are much a matter of luck and chance.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Samuelson's Economics at Fifty: Remarks on the Occasion of the Anniversary of Publication" (1998)

• “Most of mainstream economics is not "big-picture economics." Our journals and textbooks are full of the grimy details about inventory cycles or the deadweight losses incident to taxes and regulation. Besides, most big pictures are wrong.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Two Gods That Fail", Challenge, 42(5), 29-33, 1999.

• “Years ago Arthur Koestler edited The God That Failed, whose chapters report the disillusionment of one true believer after another in the promise of Marxian prophecies under the impact of contemporary actuality. It would be boring sawing of saw dust to elaborate on that god that failed. More relevant to the present moment of global economic chaos is an antipodal-polar archetype. I am speaking about the god of pure libertarian capitalism.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Two Gods That Fail", Challenge, 42(5), 29-33, 1999.

• “Years ago, I wrote aphoristically: “Inside a classical economist, you discern a neoclassical economist trying to get in.” My archetypical tableaux flesh out this heuristic perception. And, in my considered opinion, these explications cast cogent doubts on that view popular in the 1950s and early 1960s that “going back to the classics” somehow offered a different and better alternative to the post-neoclassical mainstream paradigms.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: A Quintessential (ahistorical) Tableau Economique: To Sum up Pre- and Post-Smith Classical Paradigms" in J. Biddle, J. Davis and S. Medema (eds.), Economics Broadly Considered, Essays in Honour of Warren Samuels (2001)

• “Economics never was a dismal science. It should be a realistic science.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: quoted in K. Puttaswamaiah, "Contributions of Paul A. Samuelson", in K. Puttaswamaiah, Paul Samuelson and the Foundations of Modern Economics (2002)

• “Modigliani's theory was a powerful searchlight on what was happening... It is the best explanation of what has actually been happening in the great swing of American life since the 1950's.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Paul Samuelson in: . "Franco Modigliani, 85, Nobel-Winning Economist, Dies" in New York Times, September 26, 2003.

• “However, one last caution. What has happened in Japan for 12 long years warns that an affluent society like America’s might not be immune to a self de-energization of its optimism and free spending. Do not bet on worst case scenarios. But do not ignore them completely either.”

  Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Tale of two macroeconomies", Japan and the World Economy 15 (2003)

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