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All Quotes by author - 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?' "

" 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. "

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

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

" A temporary reduction in tax rates on individual incomes can be a powerful weapon against recession. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" Economics is a choice between alternatives all the time. Those are the trade-offs. "

" 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. "

" Every good cause is worth some inefficiency. "

" Funeral by funeral, theory advances. "

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

" Good questions outrank easy answers. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I can tell you, because I serve on so many nonprofit boards - where half of us are academics and half of us are from Wall Street - that there's no CEO who understands at all a derivative. All they know is that somebody tells them in their organization, 'We've got a wonderful profit center.' "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I have not been able in one lecture even to scratch the surface of the role of maximum principles in analytic economics. "

" I'm not speaking in favor of killing innovation. I'm speaking in favor of centrist use of the market, which involves necessarily a considerable degree of regulation. Markets by themselves will get themselves inevitably into inequality and into their own destruction. It will happen again and again. "

" In 1936, money had no important role. Interest rates were one-eighth of one-eighth of one per cent. I did some research, and I found that the interest on one million dollars of ninety-day Treasuries was $37. People didn't even bother to collect it. The Fed wasn't important. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Investing should be dull. It shouldn't be exciting. "

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

" In well-functioning markets, price equals opportunity cost. Meaning that the proper way to price out and charge us for things is to charge us what those resources could otherwise have produced. This is a lesson the Soviet Union never learned at all, and the rest is history. "

" 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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