Top 130 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Samuelson - Page 2

People have the wrong idea that God will forgive Reagan. They say he didn't know what he was doing. It's true he didn't know a lot of what was going on, but he was directly responsible.

The contrafactual history is what it would have been the other way. Think of the Kennedy triumph in the missiles crisis. Worked out fine. Khrushchev blinked and so forth. The other road, you don't want to think too hard about. You could have had nuclear missiles wiping out a tenth of the globe.

In the jargon of American vaudeville, Professors Frisch and Tinbergen are a 'hard act to follow.' But then, all my life, I have been following such great scholars and policy advisors as these.

I have not been able in one lecture even to scratch the surface of the role of maximum principles in analytic economics.

Often, when I became a consultant to a federal agency, that precipitated its demise.

The dream of any scholar has, for me, come true by virtue of this award. The Nobel Prizes are justly famous in the hard sciences, in literature, and for peace.

I can tell you, because I serve on so many nonprofit boards - where half of us are academics and half of us are from Wall Street - that there's no CEO who understands at all a derivative. All they know is that somebody tells them in their organization, 'We've got a wonderful profit center.'

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.

What I say is, 'If you're so rich, how come you're so dumb?'

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.

What is it that the scientist finds useful in being able to relate a positive description of behavior to the solution of a maximizing problem? That is what a good deal of my own early work was about.

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 them

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Mea culpa, mea culpa. MIT and Wharton and University of Chicago created the financial engineering instruments, which, like Samson and Delilah, blinded every CEO. They didn't realize the kind of leverage they were doing and they didn't understand when they were really creating a real profit or a fictitious one.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Two factors explain our success. One, MIT's renaissance after World War II as a federally supported research resource. Two, the mathematical revolution in macro- and micro-economic theory and statistics. This was overdue and inevitable, MIT was the logical place for it to flourish.

Reasonable men are not reasonable when you're in the bubbles which have characterized capitalism since the beginning of time.

We are like highly trained athletes, who never run a race.

Perhaps there really are managers who can outperform the market consistently - logic would suggest that they exist. But they are remarkably well-hidden.

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.

I don't care who writes a nation's laws - or crafts its advanced treaties - if I can write its economics textbooks.

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.

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.

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?

Our ideal society finds it essential to put a rent on land as a way of maximizing the total consumption available to the society. ...Pure land rent is in the nature of a 'surplus' which can be taxed heavily without distorting production incentives or efficiency. A land value tax can be called 'the useful tax on measured land surplus'.

Two-thirds of a century after [The Road to Serfdom] got written, hindsight confirms how inaccurate its innuendo about the future turned out to be.

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.

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.

Contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, the Soviet economy is proof that a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.

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.

Forsake search for needles that are so very small in haystacks that are so very large.

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."

You could be disqualified for a job [at Harvard] if you were either smart or Jewish or Keynesian. So what chance did this smart, Jewish, Keynesian have?

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.

Economists have much to be humble about.

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.

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.

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.

Man does not live by GNP alone.

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.

Economics never was a dismal science. It should be a realistic science.

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.

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.

Let those who will write the nation's laws, if I can write its textbooks.

I don't care very much for the People Magazine approach to applied economics.

Second, they [those who disagree with market efficiency] always claim they know a man, a bank, or a fund that does do better. Alas, anecdotes are not science. And once Wharton School dissertations seek to quantify the performers, these have a tendency to evaporate into the air - or, at least, into statistically insignificant t-statistics.

Investing is like waiting for paint dry and grass grow so. If you like fun, let handle 800 USD and headed to Las Vegas

The sad truth is that it is precisely those who disagree most with the hypothesis of efficient market pricing of stocks, those who pooh-pooh beta analysis and all that, who are least able to understand the analysis needed to test that hypothesis.

You know what happiness is: 'Having a little more money than your colleagues.' And that's not so tough in academic life.

A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.

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.

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.

The stock market has predicted nine of the last five recessions.