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" One of the pleasing things about science is that we do all climb towards the heavens on the shoulders of our predecessors. Economics, like physics, has its heroes, and the letter 'H' that I used in my mathematical equations was not there to honor Sir William Hamilton, but rather Harold Hotelling. "

Paul Samuelson

Economics

Honor

Science

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

" My family was well off but not rich. 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. That was a disequilibrium system. I realized that the ordinary old-fashioned Euclidean geometry didn't apply. "

Paul Samuelson

Lazy

Rich

" 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. "

" People had J.F.K. all wrong. They thought of him as a dashing, deciding type. He was an extremely hesitant person who checked the ice in front of him all the time. "

" 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. "

Paul Samuelson

Life

Great

" 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. "

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

" When I was a kid, I reckoned things in Hershey bars. Is this worth three Hershey bars to me? "

Paul Samuelson

Worth

Kid

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" It is not easy to get rich in Las Vegas, at Churchill Downs, or at the local Merrill Lynch office. "

" Good questions outrank easy answers. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" What I say is, 'If you're so rich, how come you're so dumb?' "

" You're not making a decision if you come to a fork in the road. There is no 'it' to take. It's one or the other. "

" 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. "

" The history of the twentieth century - America's century! - has been pretty much a history of rising prices. "

" My belief is that nothing that can be expressed by mathematics cannot be expressed by careful use of literary words. "

" The very name of my subject, economics, suggests economizing or maximizing. But Political Economy has gone a long way beyond home 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. "

" 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. "

" What is it that the scientist finds useful in being able to relate a positive description of behavior to the solution of a maximizing problem? That is what a good deal of my own early work was about. "