Top 130 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Samuelson - Page 3

Even fans of actively managed funds often concede that most other investors would be better off in index funds. But buoyed by abundant self-confidence, these folks aren't about to give up on actively managed funds themselves. A tad delusional? I think so. Picking the best-performing funds is 'like trying to predict the dice before you roll them down the craps table,' says an investment adviser in Boca Raton, FL. 'I can't do it. The public can't do it.'

But the trouble is that he [Alan Greenspan] had been an Ayn Rander. You can take the boy out of the cult but you can't take the cult out of the boy.

Even if this advice to portfolio decision makers to drop dead is good advice, it obviously is not counsel that will be eagerly followed. Few people will commit suicide without a push. And fewer still will pay good money to be told to do what is against human nature and self-interest to do.

I spent the four years I was an undergraduate working on the beach. And it wasn't because I was lazy; it was because my freshman class would go to a hundred different employers and wouldn't get a nibble.

The niceties of existence were not a matter of concern, yet everything around was closed down most of the time. If you lived in a middle-class community in Chicago, children and adults came daily to the door saying, 'We are starving, how about a potato?' I speak from poignant memory.

The debate can be put in the form of the question: Resolved, that the best of money managers cannot be demonstrated to be able to deliver the goods of superior portfolio-selection performance. Any jury that reviews the evidence, and there is a great deal of relevant evidence, must at least come out with the Scottish verdict: Superior investment performance is unproved.

Anyone with special abilities earns a differential return on that flair, which we economists call a rent. Those few with extraordinary P.Q. (Performance Quotient) will not give away such rent to the Ford Foundation or the local bank trust department. They have too high an I.Q. for that.

That's what I would like to do until the end of time, to go on scribbling my articles on the third floor of the Sloan Building, in between playing tennis and drinking coffee at my other study in the Concord Avenue branch of Burger King.

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.

First, those who disagree with market efficiency simply assert that it stands to common sense that greater effort to get facts and greater acumen in analyzing those facts will pay off in better performance somehow measured. (By this logic, cure for cancer must have been found by 1955).