Paul Samuelson quotes

Paul Samuelson was an influential American economist and the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. His work laid the foundations for modern economic theory and shaped academic economics in the 20th century. He played a key role in popularizing Keynesian economics and advancing mathematical approaches in the field. Here are 78 of his quotes:

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.

Paul Samuelson

Globalization presumes sustained economic growth. Otherwise, the process loses its economic benefits and political support.

Paul Samuelson

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

Paul Samuelson

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

Paul Samuelson

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

Paul Samuelson

Self-deception ultimately explains Japan's plight. The Japanese have never accepted that change is in their interest - and not merely a response to U.S. criticism.

Paul Samuelson

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.

Paul Samuelson

Asia's governments come in two broad varieties: young, fragile democracies - and older, fragile authoritarian regimes.

Paul Samuelson

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

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

Good questions outrank easy answers.

Paul Samuelson

Funeral by funeral, theory advances.

Paul Samuelson

An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed.

Paul Samuelson

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

Paul Samuelson

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

Paul Samuelson

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

Paul Samuelson

Every good cause is worth some inefficiency.

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

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

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

I tell no secret when I repeat that fame and reputation are much a matter of luck and chance.

Paul Samuelson

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