Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

English Italiano Polski עברית Français Português فارسی Español 中文 Русский Deutsch العربية हिन्दी 日本語 Ελληνικά Latina

Paul Samuelson

95 quotes

“A later writer, such as Leijonhufvud, I knew to have it wrong, when he later argued the merits of Keynes’s subtle intuitions and downplayed the various (identical!) mathematical versions of The General Theory. The so-called 1937 Hicks or later Hicks–Hansen IS–LM diagram will do as an example for the debate.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: in William A. Barnett, An Interview with Paul A. Samuelson (December 23, 2003)
“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 (1915–2009) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: in William A. Barnett, An Interview with Paul A. Samuelson (December 23, 2003)
“My notion of a fruitful economic science would be that it can help us explain and understand the course of actual economic history. A scholar who seriously addresses commentary on contemporary monthly and yearly events is, in this view, practicing the study of history—history in its most contemporary time phasing.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: in William A. Barnett, An Interview with Paul A. Samuelson (December 23, 2003)
“An evolving discipline–whether it be history or economics or astrophysics or immunology–is ever dynamically changing. Two steps forward and X steps back, so to speak. Periodically, the scholarly group registers more or less self-confidence, self-esteem, and complacency. We careerists are happiest when recent past achievements have seemed to be successful, but when still there are completable tasks dimly visible ahead.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Foreword: Eavesdropping on the Future?" in New Frontiers in Economics (2004)
“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 (1915–2009) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Foreword: Eavesdropping on the Future?" in New Frontiers in Economics (2004)
“I had a great admiration for Pigou. I thought that, in many ways, he was not only a faithful follower of Alfred Marshall, but he was also a more fertile developer of the Marshallian tradition than Marshall himself. … Whitehead said to me:“Don’t you think that Pigou was an overrated economist? Wasn’t Foxwell a better man?” Since I am an honest man, I said to Whitehead:“No, I think Pigou was a much more important economist than Foxwell.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Kotaro Suzumura, An interview with Paul Samuelson: welfare economics,“old” and “new”, and social choice theory (2005)
“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 (1915–2009) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Kotaro Suzumura, An interview with Paul Samuelson: welfare economics,“old” and “new”, and social choice theory (2005)
“Arrow’s general impossibility theorem does not disprove the existence of the Bergsonian social welfare function, neither does it disprove the existence of the Benthamite hedonistic function.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Kotaro Suzumura, An interview with Paul Samuelson: welfare economics,“old” and “new”, and social choice theory (2005)
“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 (1915–2009) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Coeditor's Forword in Inside the economist’s mind: conversations with eminent economists (2007)
“We economists love to quote Keynes’s final lines in his 1936 General Theory—for the reason that they cater so well to our vanity and self-importance. But to admit the truth, madmen in authority can self generate their own frenzies without needing help from either defunct or avant-garde economists. What establishment economists brew up is as often what the Prince and the Public are already wanting to imbibe. We guys don’t stay in the best club by proffering the views of some past academic crank or academic sage.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Coeditor's Forword in Inside the economist’s mind: conversations with eminent economists (2007)
“My final words are cut short by this audience’s well-fed drowsiness. I will leave as a question for later discussion: Will hedge funds make our golden years more golden, or will the new concoctions of option engineers, instead of reducing risks by spreading them optimally (in fact, by making possible about 100 to 1 over leveraging), result in microeconomic losses for pension funds and, maybe someday, even threaten the macro system with lethal financial implosions?”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Is Personal Finance a Science?", in Z. Bodie, D. McLeavey and L.B. Siegel (eds.) The Future of Life-Cycle Saving and Investing (2007)
“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 (1915–2009) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Farewell to Friedman-Hayek Libertarian Capitalism", Tribune Media Services (2008)
“Scholars still debate whether Columbus brought syphilis to the New World or vice versa. But it cannot be doubted that the 2008 world meltdown carries on its label the words Made in America.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Farewell to Friedman-Hayek Libertarian Capitalism", Tribune Media Services (2008)
“Well, I will say this. And this is the main thing to remember. 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. It can be better or it can be worse, but there isn't guaranteed predictability in these matters.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Conor Clarke, An Interview With Paul Samuelson, Part One (2009)
“When I once called myself a “Sunday painter” dabbling in stochastic finance, that was not meant to belittle finance theory as a branch of serious economic theory. Such a peculiar view was expressed again and again by the late Milton Friedman, a dizzy view that I still find incomprehensible.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Enjoyable Life Puzzling Over Modern Finance Theory", Annu. Rev. Financ. Econ. 2009. 1:19–35
“From the beginning I could not believe that the “efficient market” hypothesis was dependent on a pure Brownian motion white noise or any truly random random walk. Place a minuscule colloidal molecule on a horizontal table that covers unlimited acres. Bombard it from every direction with thousands of minute atoms; and then if you wait long enough that original molecule can have traveled a billion miles in one direction. That’s truly a random Bachelier-Einstein walk, but not my notion of economic fluctuations.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Enjoyable Life Puzzling Over Modern Finance Theory", Annu. Rev. Financ. Econ. 2009. 1:19–35
“Moral: To understand economics you need to know not only fundamentals but also its nuances. Darwin is in the nuances. When someone preaches “Economics in one lesson,” I advise: Go back for the second lesson.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Enjoyable Life Puzzling Over Modern Finance Theory", Annu. Rev. Financ. Econ. 2009. 1:19–35
“Moral: free markets do not stabilize themselves. Zero regulating is vastly suboptimal to rational regulating. Libertarianism is its own worst enemy!”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Enjoyable Life Puzzling Over Modern Finance Theory", Annu. Rev. Financ. Econ. 2009. 1:19–35
“Markets are not perfect, which is true even for rationally regulated markets. Nevertheless, over the last thousand years every attempt to organize sizeable societies without important dependence on markets has generated its own failure ...”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Enjoyable Life Puzzling Over Modern Finance Theory", Annu. Rev. Financ. Econ. 2009. 1:19–35
“Herein lies the secret of the General Theory. It is a badly written book, poorly organized; any layman who, beguiled by the author's previous reputation, bought the book was cheated of his five shillings. It is not well suited for classroom use. It is arrogant, bad-tempered, polemical, and not overly generous in its acknowledgments. It abounds in mares' nests or confusions. In it the Keynesian system stands out indistinctly, as if the author were hardly aware of its existence or cognizant of its properties; and certainly he is at his worst when expounding its relations to its predecessors. Flashes of insight and intuition intersperse tedious algebra. An awkward definition suddenly gives way to an unforgettable cadenza. When finally mastered, its analysis is found to be obvious and at the same time new. In short, it is a work of genius.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Lord Keynes and the General Theory", Econometrica (1946)
“In the preface to the reissue of Risk, Uncertainty and Proﬁt, Frank Knight makes the penetrating observation that under the conditions envisaged above the velocity of circulation would become inﬁnite and so would the price level. This is perhaps an over-dramatic way of saying that nobody would hold money, and it would become a free good to go into the category of shell and other things which once served as money. We should expect too that it would not only pass out of circulation, but it would cease to be used as a conventional numeraire in terms of which prices are expressed. Interest bearing money would emerge. Of course, the above does not happen in real life, precisely because uncertainty, contingency needs, non-synchronization of revenues and outlay, transaction frictions, etc., etc., all are with us. But the abstract special case analyzed above should warn us against the facile assumption that the average levels of the structure of interest rates are determined solely or primarily by these differential factors. At times they are primary, and at other times, such as the twenties in this country, they may not be. As a generalization I should hazard the hypothesis that they are likely to be of great importance in an economy in which there is a “quasi-zero" rate of interest. I think by this hypothesis one can explain many of the anomalies of the United States money market in the thirties.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1915–2009) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 8th ed., 1970, p. 218
“Perhaps all we can expect of a public body, charged with grave responsibilities, is that it should in its public utterances make out cases stronger than it really believes in. Or perhaps, because its opposition deals in overly strong criticisms, it may for political reasons and for understandable psychological reasons provide overly strong rebuttals. Or perhaps it is the case that the authorities believe that there are no sensible reasons to doubt the following view: The way to maximize growth, to maximize the long-run degree of achieved employment, to maximize equity among the various social groups that could be affected by price level changes is, in the absence of important cost pressures and even more in their presence, for the Federal Reserve to insist upon the attainment of essentially stable long-run price levels.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Reflections on Monetary Policy", The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Aug., 1960)
“In the absence of perfect certainty, the futures prices needed for making the requisite wealth-like comparisons are simply unavailable. So it would be difficult to make operational the theorist’s desired measures. But operational practicality aside, if the theorist specifies in detail the dynamic technology of his model, he will meet none of the pitfalls that come from an attempt to summarize his model by various crude aggregations. The contradictions that result from over-crude aggregation should never be confused with the technical relations that hold at the firm and family level or with the market capitalizations which hold in competitive security and asset markets.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Evaluation of 'Social Income': Capital Formation and Wealth", in F. A. Lutz and D. C. Hague (eds.), The Theory of Capital (1961)
“I will tell you a secret. Economists are supposed to be dry-as-dust, dismal fellows. This is quite wrong, the reverse of the truth. Scratch a hard-boiled economist of the libertarian persuasion and you find a Don Quixote underneath. No lovesick maiden ever pined for the days of medieval chivalry with such sentimental impracticality as some economists long for the return to a Victorian marketplace that is completely free. Completely free? Well, almost so. There must, of course, be the constable to ensure that voluntary contracts are enforced and to protect the property rights of each molecule which is an island unto itself.”
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)
“Complete freedom is not definable once two wills exist in the same interdependent universe. We can sometimes find two situations in which Choice A is more free than Choice B in apparently every respect and at least as good as B in every other relevant sense. In such singular cases I will certainly throw in my lot with the exponents of individualism. But few situations are really of this simple type; and these few are hardly worth talking about, because they will already have been disposed of so easily. In most actual situations we come to a point at which choices between goals must be made: Do you want this kind of freedom and this kind of hunger, or that kind of freedom and that kind of hunger? I use these terms in a quasi-algebraic sense, but actually what is called "f reedom" is really a vector of almost infinite components rather than a one-dimensional thing that can be given a simple ordering.”
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)
“For better or worse, the picture album whose pages I have been turning is that of the main stream of international economics. Many of its advances lie in what the historian of science Thomas Kuhn would call 'normal' rather than 'revolutionary' science. It is hard to imagine having had too good an education and too good a research environment. And yet as we grapple with the ever-changing problems of the modern world that are arising in the deliberations of this World Congress, we know we must put aside the pictures and souvenirs of the past, and we must turn a youthful eye out to meet the emerging universe.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Way of an Economist", in Paul A. Samuelson (ed.), International Economic Relations: Proceedings of the Third Congress (1969)
“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 (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
“With the assistance of mathematics, I can see a property of the ninety-nine dimensional surfaces hidden from the naked eye. If an increase in the price of fertilizer alone always increases the amount the firm buys of caviar, from that fact alone I can predict the answer to the following experiment which I have never seen performed and upon which I have no observations: an increase in the price of caviar alone will increase the amount the firm buys of fertilizer. In thermodynamics such reciprocity or integrability conditions are known as Maxwell Conditions; in economics they are known as Hotelling conditions in honor of Harold Hotelling’s 1932 work.”
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
“There is really nothing more pathetic than to have an economist or a retired engineer try to force analogies between the concepts of physics and the concepts of economics. How many dreary papers have I had to referee in which the author is looking for something that corresponds to entropy or to one or another form of energy. Nonsensical laws, such as the law of conservation of purchasing power, represent spurious social science imitations of the important physical law of the conservation of energy; and when an economist makes reference to a Heisenberg Principle of indeterminacy in the social world, at best this must be regarded as a figure of speech or a play on words, rather than a valid application of the relations of quantum mechanics.”
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
“The small investor can now, for the first time, invest in common stocks and bonds in an efficient and convenient way. I am talking about people who don't have $ 10 million; who don't want to take unnecessary gambles; who operate under no Napoleonic delusions of being able to pick winners that will quadruple their money; who begrudge every minute devoted to keeping tax and personal records, and wish to think about their investments only at New Year's and when preparing their tax returns. Disinterested experts in finance prescribe for such people as follows: 1. Depending on your tolerance for the irreducible risks involved in owning common stocks, decide what portion of your nest egg you wish to keep in common stocks: 0, 100, 30 or 70 per cent. No one can decide this for you. You must decide at what point you'll sleep best at night, and whether eventually stocks will provide a better inflation hedge than they have done these last dozen years. ( Many will settle for 50-50. ) 2. For what common stocks you do decide to own, follow the golden rules of prudence : Diversify broadly, hold down costly turnover, keep all fees (and book- keeping !) minimal. 3. The same rules (diversification, etc.) apply to your holdings of tax-free and ordinary bonds. If you have taxable income of $ 20,000 or more, probably the bulk of your bonds should be " municipals " -i.e., state and local issues that escape all Federal tax because Congress refuses to close this loophole. Less affluent people will probably do as well in local savings accounts as in anything else. Now you know what to do. How do you do it?”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Coping Sensibly," Newsweek (6 March 1978)
“Yes, Keynes was a genius. Yes, some of his ideas were inchoate and would not have lent themselves usefully to diagramming and symbolic manipulation. Yes, by the time of the Radcliffe committee many of his British admirers were still frozen in the Model T version of his system. And yes, Keynes resented excessive simplifying of his paradigms. Nevertheless, in science it is not the incoherent, inchoate and ineffable that has a cash value. If that were so, Goethe would be a greater scientist than either Einstein or Newton. What matters is the Kuhnian paradigm that people who are not geniuses can use. That which so many scholars independently agreed upon cannot be independent of the text that Keynes wrote down for them to read. What is remarkable is not the cogency of the case that Leijonhufvud manages to muster, which is rather flimsy, but rather how strong was the latent demand in the 1970s for a work to debunk Keynesianism. Harry Johnson put the same point in a different way.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Keynes Centenary: Sympathy from the other Cambridge", The Economist Vol. 287 (1983),; later in The Collected Scientific Papers of Paul Samuelson, Volume 5 (1986), p. 277-278
“An optimist who lived at a time when the world economy was running so badly that clever gimmicks could still work wonders, Keynes's object was to save capitalism from itself. In the end, his prescription in its most simple form self-destructed, as the obligation to run a full-employment humanitarian state caused modern economies to succumb to the new disease of stagflation - high inflation along with joblessness and excess capacity. Economists of the most diverse views are constantly asking themselves: What would Keynes advise if he were now alive. And usually - whether the economist is a free-marketeer like Friederick von Hayek or one with strong interventionist leanings like John Kenneth Galbraith - they pay Keynes the supreme compliment of believing that if brought back to earth, Maynard would be favoring just what each of them happens to favor. One also might wonder what Lord Keynes would prescribe for the huge structural deficit of Ronald Reagan, with the crowding out of investment that it implies once the American economy reattains high levels of employment.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The House That Keynes Built", The New York Times (May 29, 1983)
“I reproach myself for a gross error. But I would reproach myself more if I had persisted in an error after observations revealed it clearly to be that. I made a deal of money in the late 1940s on the bull side, ignoring Satchel Paige’s advice to Lot’s wife, “Never look back.” Rather I would advocate Samuelson’s Law: “Always look back. You may learn something from your residuals. Usually one’s forecasts are not so good as one remembers them; the difference may be instructive.” The dictum “If you must forecast, forecast often,” is neither a joke nor a confession of impotence. It is a recognition of the primacy of brute fact over pretty theory. That part of the future that cannot be related to the present’s past is precisely what science cannot hope to capture. Fortunately, there is plenty of work for science to do, plenty of scientific tasks not yet done.”
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)
“Let us summarise the lessons learned. 1. Though achieving private-property perfect competition will achieve productive efficiency, moving toward it may have made matters worse. And, in the land-enclosure problem, the transition must make things worse before they get better when lands are virtually homogeneous. 2. In the realistic case where lands differ in quality, partial privatisation may also worsen efficiency - even though ultimately efficiency will be enhanced by the deregulation process. 3. However, in the realistic case, an optimal choice of lands to be first privatised could be first to improve the commons. The rule for a 'perfectly-discriminating deregulator' to follow is evidently this: privatise those lands first whose 'imputed labour share'- as measured by the MP/AP fraction- is the lowest. That way, the first bit of deregulation can do more good than harm, as labour is transferred away from low marginal-product locations; that way, if there is inevitable transition harm, it can be kept to a minimum. There would seem to be a presumption that things get worse before they get better in such a programme of moving toward laissez-faire.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: When Deregulation Makes Things Worse Before They Get Better" in C. Moir and J. Dawson (eds.), Competition and Markets, Essays in Honour of Margaret Hall (1990)
“As a theorist I have great advantages. All I need is a pencil (now a ball pen) and an empty pad of paper. There are analysts who sit and look vacantly out the window, but after the age of 20 I was not one of them. I ought to envy the new generation who have grown up with the computer, but I don’t. None of them known to me sits idly at the console, improvising and experimenting in the way that a composer does at the piano. That ought to become increasingly possible. But up to now, in my observation, the computer is largely a black box into which researchers feed raw input and out of from which they draw various summarizing measures and simulations. Not having access to look around in the box, the investigator has less intuitive familiarity with the data than used to be the case in the bad old days.”
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)
“To the student of economic history the preponderant truth is that technical change has since 1750 tended to raise market clearing real wage rates. This property of the Age After Newton is hard to understand and explicate if you believe that sterile congealed-dead-labor is embodied in machines almost infinitely substitutable for live labor; equally confusing to you will be the truth that inventions which are labor saving may at the same time be wage raising! The doctrines of equated rates of surplus value moved Marxians backward from square one in the understanding of the laws of motion of the capitalistic system or the system of the Mixed Economy.”
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 Coase-Samuelson generation were brought up witnessing the great debate between von Mises and Lerner-Lange concerning the feasibility of socialist rational pricing to produce Utopia. (That was a reprise of earlier Pareto-Barone-Wieser-Taylor debates.) Many contemporaries believed Lerner-Lange triumphed in the debate. I came to believe that Friedrich Hayek was the true victor. Under static conditions where all is known or knowable (to whom?), whatever optimal states laissez-faire might occasion, so could some computer solution or some algorithms of play the game of competition also achieve. But in the real world all is changing, even in the time it takes me to write this sentence. Hayek has been persuasive — not in Whig ideology or in declaring that moderate reform of laissez-faire leads inevitably down the road to totalitarian socialism but — in arguing that experience suggests that only with heavy dependence on market pricing mechanisms can there be realized quasi-efficient and quasi-progressive organization of societies involving humans as Darwinian history has bequeathed them. If a reader does not find the Hayek dynamic arguments persuasive, I will not here argue the matter further.”
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)
“The pre-1800 pattern of commercial panics had to be a case of NON MACRO-EFFICIENCY of markets. We’ve come a long way, baby, in two hundred years toward micro efficiency of markets: Black-Scholes option pricing, indexing of portfolio diversification, and so forth. But there is no persuasive evidence, either from economic history or avant garde theorizing, that MACRO MARKET INEFFICIENCY is trending toward extinction: The future can well witness the oldest business cycle mechanism, the South Sea Bubble, and that kind of thing. We have no theory of the putative duration of a bubble. It can always go as long again as it has already gone. You cannot make money on correcting macro inefficiencies in the price level of the stock market.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Summing Up On Business Cycles: Opening Address" in Jeffrey C. Fuhrer, ‎Scott Schuh (eds), Beyond Shocks: What Causes Business Cycles? (1998)
“An economy’s inventory of produced inputs is both complex and simple. Maintaining and improving upon congeries of productive inputs is an indispensable part of economic progress. All such time-phased processes will not evolve automatically: cave-people rose and fell in material well-being; eons passed without much cumulative change; great diversity of performance characterized geographically separated societies. Attempts to generalize simple family’s or related-families’ habit formation to large-group polities—à la utopian experimental cults or in the Lenin-Stalin and Mao pattern have not hitherto succeeded in organizing production with approximate Pareto-Optimality efficiency features. Gradual evolution toward near laissez-faire market mechanism responding to individual’s self-interest, history suggests and advanced economic theory second guesses, will incur areas of market failure and will generate and perpetuate considerable degrees of economic and political inequalities. Just as there is no asymptotic communist utopia, neither is an asymptotic laissez-faire utopia.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Modern Post-Mortem on Böhm's Capital Theory: Its Vital Normative Flaw Shared by Pre-Sraffian Mainstream Capital Theory", Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Volume 23, Number 3 (2001)
“You must realize how bad, temporarily, capitalism had become in public opinion. I remember seeing a poll of small town attitudes in local newspapers. They asked questions like "should we nationalize the banking system?" More than half of those editors, about the most conservative group in the world, were in favor of nationalizing the banking system. Father Coughlin, the Detroit demagogue who turned anti-Semitic, complained about "fountain pen money, the perpetrator of great wealth, the money changers in the temple." It was kind of a crude expansionism. Huey Long and "every man a millionaire," or whatever it was. So I would say that Keynes thought of himself as saving the system. And lots of the New Dealers ― original New Dealers, Veblenites, technocrats ― did not like Keynesian economics. They said "that is using palliatives, it's not getting rid of the wicked capitalistic ethos." Keynes told Roosevelt when he came here in 1933 that he needed to spend so much more per month in deficit spending. He gave very precise figures with great self-confidence.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Parker in Randall E. Parker (ed.), Reflections on the Great Depression (2002)
“The proof of the pudding is in the eating. There was a widespread myth of the 1970s, a myth along Tom Kuhn’s (1962) Structure of Scientific Revolutions lines. The Keynesianism, which worked so well in Camelot and brought forth a long epoch of price-level stability with good Q growth and nearly full employment, gave way to a new and quite different macro view after 1966. A new paradigm, monistic monetarism, so the tale narrates, gave a better fit. And therefore King Keynes lost self esteem and public esteem. The King is dead. Long live King Milton! Contemplate the true facts. Examine 10 prominent best forecasting models 1950 to 1980: Wharton, Townsend–Greenspan, Michigan Model, St. Louis Reserve Bank, Citibank Economic Department under Walter Wriston’s choice of Lief Olson, et cetera. … M did matter as for almost everyone. But never did M alone matter systemically, as post-1950 Friedman monetarism professed.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: in William A. Barnett, An Interview with Paul A. Samuelson (December 23, 2003)
“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 (1915–2009) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: in William A. Barnett, An Interview with Paul A. Samuelson (December 23, 2003)
“Instead of attenuating this paper’s theses, heterogeneity amplifies its importance. Contemplate a scenario where Schumpeter’s fruitful capitalist destruction harms a really sizeable fraction of the future U.S. population and, say, improves welfare of another group and does that so much as to justify a calculation that the winners could be made to transfer some of their gains and thereby leave no substantial U.S. group net losers from free trade. Should noneconomists accept this as cogent rebuttal if there is no evidence that compensating fiscal transfers have been made or will be made? Marie Antoinette said, “Let them eat cake.” But history records no transfer of sugar and flour to her peasant subjects. Even the sage Dr. Greenspan sometimes sounds Antoinette-ish. The economists’ literature of the 1930s—Hicks, Lerner, Kaldor, Scitovsky and others, to say nothing of earlier writings by J.S. Mill, Edgeworth, Pareto and Viner—perpetrates something of a shell game in ethical debates about the conflict between efficiency and greater inequality. Policy aside and ethical judgments aside, mainstream trade economists have insufficiently noticed the drastic change in mean U.S. incomes and in inequalities among different U.S. classes. As in any other society, perhaps a third of Americans are not highly educated and not energetic enough to qualify for skilled professional jobs. If mass immigration into the United States of similar workers to them had been permitted to actually take place, mainstream economists could not avoid predicting a substantial drop in wages of this native group while the new immigrants were earning a substantial rise over what their old-country real wages had been.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Where Ricardo and Mill Rebut and Confirm Arguments of Mainstream Economists Supporting Globalization", Journal of Economic Perspectives (Summer 2004)
“Well, I'd say, and this is probably a change from what I would have said when I was younger: Have a very healthy respect for the study of economic history, because that's the raw material out of which any of your conjectures or testings will come. And I think the recent period has illustrated that. The governor of the Bank of England seems to have forgotten or not known that there was no bank insurance in England, so when Northern Rock got a run, he was surprised. Well, he shouldn't have been. But history doesn't tell its own story. You've got to bring to it all the statistical testings that are possible. And we have a lot more information now than we used to.”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Conor Clarke, An Interview With Paul Samuelson, Part Two (2009)