Paul Samuelson
Economist
1915-05-15
Quotes by Paul Samuelson
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In this age of specialization, I sometimes think of myself as the last 'generalist' in economics, with interests that range from mathematical economics down to current financial journalism. My real interests are research and teaching.
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It is indeed true that the stock market can forecast the business cycle.
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I believe, in the stock market - that's one of my fields - that most people are irrational. And to be irrational, you can be irrational in so many different ways that, practically, the result is indeterminate.
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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.
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It is dead wrong about necessary surplus of winnings over losings.
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I decided that there was only one place to make money in the mutual fund business, as there is only one place for a temperate man to be in a saloon: behind the bar and not in front of it.
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A temporary reduction in tax rates on individual incomes can be a powerful weapon against recession.
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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.
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Let those who will - write the nation's laws - if I can write its textbooks.
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I think economics - and this is what I've tried to impart - has a tremendous amount of human interest in it.
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The history of the twentieth century - America's century! - has been pretty much a history of rising prices.
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To a person of analytical ability, perceptive enough to realise that mathematical equipment was a powerful sword in economics, the world of economics was his or her oyster in 1935. The terrain was strewn with beautiful theorems begging to be picked up and arranged in unified order.
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Today we see how utterly mistaken was the Milton Friedman notion that a market system can regulate itself... Everyone understands now, on the contrary, that there can be no solution without government.
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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.
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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.
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Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.
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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.
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U.S. capital formation, which has been pretty high in the '90s and very high in the late 1990s, is what is being financed by the savings of the rest of the world, generally poorer than ourselves, because our deficit on current account, chronic deficit, is their surplus, and they have been willingly bringing that to the American market.
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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.
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