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The Great Gatsby
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Paul Samuelson Quotes

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.

– Paul Samuelson

Keynes’s contribution was not just to advocate spending government money in the middle of a recession. Every government had done that going back to the days of the Irish potato famine. What he gave to us was a way of thinking about the magnitude and the dimensions and so forth.

– Paul Samuelson

Companies are not charitable enterprises: They hire workers to make profits. In the United States, this logic still works. In Europe, it hardly does.

– Paul Samuelson

What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don’t know very much.

– Paul Samuelson

Avoiding inflation is not an absolute imperative but rather is one of a number of conflicting goals that we must pursue and that we may often have to compromise.

– Paul Samuelson

Funeral by funeral, theory advances.

– Paul Samuelson

It is dead wrong about necessary surplus of winnings over losings.

– Paul Samuelson

Economics has never been a science – and it is even less now than a few years ago.

– Paul Samuelson

Milton Friedman. Friedman had a solid MV = PQ doctrine from which he deviated very little all his life. By the way, he’s about as smart a guy as you’ll meet. He’s as persuasive as you hope not to meet.

– Paul Samuelson

Charles Darwin got his theory, his notion of natural selection, evolution, and so did its independent discoverer, Alfred Wallace, from reading Malthus.

– Paul Samuelson

Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear – and what they want to hear is what won’t happen.

– Paul Samuelson

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.

– Paul Samuelson

Rent control created deadweight loss.

– Paul Samuelson

Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.

– Paul Samuelson

I did not throw out my education lightly, but what I was being taught was of no use in explaining what I saw around me. It was the Great Depression.

– Paul Samuelson

The Malthusian Theory – that mankind, for biological and sociological reasons, is so fertile, so fecund, that if you started out with the new continent and plenty of land for everybody, in several generations we would multiply our numbers.

– Paul Samuelson

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.

– Paul Samuelson

Women are men without money.

– Paul Samuelson

Things swept so badly that I had distrust – after 1967, let’s say – of American Keynesianism. For better or worse, U.S. Keynesianism was so far ahead of where it started. I am a cafeteria Keynesian.

– Paul Samuelson

I came to the University of Chicago on the morning of January 2, 1932. I wasn’t yet a graduate of high school for another few months. And that was about the low point of the Herbert Hoover/Andrew Mellon phase after October of 1929. That’s quite a number of years to have inaction.

– Paul Samuelson

Let those who will – write the nation’s laws – if I can write its textbooks.

– Paul Samuelson

It is indeed true that the stock market can forecast the business cycle.

– Paul Samuelson

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.

– Paul Samuelson

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.

– Paul Samuelson

I think economics – and this is what I’ve tried to impart – has a tremendous amount of human interest in it.

– Paul Samuelson

Economics is not an exact science. It’s a combination of an art and elements of science. And that’s almost the first and last lesson to be learned about economics: that in my judgment, we are not converging toward exactitude, but we’re improving our data bases and our ways of reasoning about them.

– Paul Samuelson

We’ve become a debtor nation. I don’t mean just on fixed-loan terms, but we own increasingly less abroad than is owned from abroad here.

– Paul Samuelson

I can’t think of a president who has been overburdened by a knowledge of economics.

– Paul Samuelson

Actually, in my advanced, high-falutin’ frontier economics, I often work with what I define as ‘money metric utility,’ and I ask people, ‘Do you really want that? What are you willing to pay for that?’

– Paul Samuelson

Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It’s an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.

– Paul Samuelson

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