Paul Samuelson Quotes

Enjoy the top 69 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Paul Samuelson.

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

“Every good cause is worth some inefficiency.”

— Paul Samuelson

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

— Paul Samuelson

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

— Paul Samuelson

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

— 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

“Funeral by funeral, theory advances.”

— 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

“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.”

— Paul Samuelson

“Economics never was a dismal science. I should be a realistic science.”

— Paul Samuelson

“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.”

— Paul Samuelson

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.

— Paul Samuelson

“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.”

— Paul Samuelson

“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.”

— Paul Samuelson

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).

— Paul Samuelson

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

— Paul Samuelson

“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.”

— Paul Samuelson

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.

— Paul Samuelson

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.

— Paul Samuelson

“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.'”

— Paul Samuelson

“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.”

— Paul Samuelson

“Man does not live by GNP alone.”

— Paul Samuelson

“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.”

— Paul Samuelson

“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.”

— Paul Samuelson

“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

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

— Paul Samuelson

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

— Paul Samuelson

“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'.”

— Paul Samuelson

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

— Paul Samuelson

“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.”

— Paul Samuelson

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.

— 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

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

— Paul Samuelson

“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.”

— Paul Samuelson

“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.”

— Paul Samuelson

“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.”

— Paul Samuelson

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.

— Paul Samuelson

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

— Paul Samuelson

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

— Paul Samuelson

“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.”

— Paul Samuelson

“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.”

— Paul Samuelson

“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.”

— Paul Samuelson

“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.”