Welcome to the world of Paul Samuelson, a renowned economist whose insights have shaped modern economic thought. Paul Anthony Samuelson, born on May 15, 1915, was an American economist who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1970. His contributions to the field of economics are immense, particularly through his seminal work Foundations of Economic Analysis and his influential textbook Economics: An Introductory Analysis, which has educated generations of students.
Samuelson’s ideas have left an indelible mark on the discipline, spanning from microeconomic theory to macroeconomic policy. He was a pioneer in formalizing many concepts that are now fundamental to economics, such as the neoclassical synthesis, which integrated Keynesian economics with classical economic theory. His ability to communicate complex ideas in a clear and accessible manner has made his work not only influential within academic circles but also widely read and understood by the general public. As we delve into the wisdom of Paul Samuelson, we uncover profound insights that continue to shape economic thinking to this day. Below, you’ll find a collection of Paul Samuelson quotes, ready to inspire, enlighten, and provoke thought on matters of economics and beyond.
Time is our ultimate scarcity. Isaac Newton can give us more electricity, but he can’t give us more than 24 hours of the day of time. And so we’re constantly having to sacrifice alternate activities to get the one that pleases us most. Paul Samuelson
Rent control created deadweight loss. 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
Economics has never been a science – and it is even less now than a few years ago. 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
Globalization presumes sustained economic growth. Otherwise, the process loses its economic benefits and political support. 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
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
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. Paul Samuelson
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
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
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. Paul Samuelson
My belief is that nothing that can be expressed by mathematics cannot be expressed by careful use of literary words. Paul Samuelson
What I say is, ‘If you’re so rich, how come you’re so dumb?’ Paul Samuelson
The history of the twentieth century – America’s century! – has been pretty much a history of rising prices. Paul Samuelson
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. Paul Samuelson
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. Paul Samuelson
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. Paul Samuelson
Often, when I became a consultant to a federal agency, that precipitated its demise. Paul Samuelson
The very name of my subject, economics, suggests economizing or maximizing. But Political Economy has gone a long way beyond home economics. Paul Samuelson
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. Paul Samuelson
Let me acknowledge that I realize that, in honoring me, the Committee of the Royal Academy of Sciences is in fact saying a good word for all of those of my generation who have been laboring in the same vineyard. Paul Samuelson
It is indeed true that the stock market can forecast the business cycle. 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
To a person of analytical ability, perceptive enough to realise that mathematical equipment was a powerful sword in economics, the world of economics was his or her oyster in 1935. The terrain was strewn with beautiful theorems begging to be picked up and arranged in unified order. 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
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
People have the wrong idea that God will forgive Reagan. They say he didn’t know what he was doing. It’s true he didn’t know a lot of what was going on, but he was directly responsible. 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
Charles Darwin got his theory, his notion of natural selection, evolution, and so did its independent discoverer, Alfred Wallace, from reading Malthus. Paul Samuelson
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.’ Paul Samuelson
Good questions outrank easy answers. 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
There’s nothing in Keynesian economics that would allow you to solve stagflation. But there’s nothing in neoclassical economics that would allow you to solve stagflation, either. Paul Samuelson
I can’t think of a president who has been overburdened by a knowledge of economics. Paul Samuelson
Funeral by funeral, theory advances. 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
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
A temporary reduction in tax rates on individual incomes can be a powerful weapon against recession. Paul Samuelson
The parts of physics that are exact are the parts of physics that are exact. The parts that are inexact are vastly greater. Sensible scientists don’t waste their time pushing against doors that endlessly will not give. They are opportunistic and go where they can, but there are pitfalls in that. Paul Samuelson
The dream of any scholar has, for me, come true by virtue of this award. The Nobel Prizes are justly famous in the hard sciences, in literature, and for peace. Paul Samuelson
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. Paul Samuelson
It is not easy to get rich in Las Vegas, at Churchill Downs, or at the local Merrill Lynch office. Paul Samuelson
The remarkable fact is not how much government does to control economic activity, but how much it does not do. 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
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. Paul Samuelson
Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It’s an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles. Paul Samuelson
Asia’s governments come in two broad varieties: young, fragile democracies – and older, fragile authoritarian regimes. 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
The problem is no longer that with every pair of hands that comes into the world there comes a hungry stomach. Rather it is that, attached to those hands are sharp elbows. Paul Samuelson
What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don’t know very much. Paul Samuelson
‘There are no easy pickings.’ That would be a more accurate, less dramatic statement than ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch.’ 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
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
I have not been able in one lecture even to scratch the surface of the role of maximum principles in analytic economics. 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
I think that it’s more important for an economist to be wise and sophisticated in scientific method than it is for a physicist because with controlled laboratory experiments possible, they practically guide you; you couldn’t go astray. Whereas in economics, by dogma and misunderstanding, you can go very sadly astray. 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
Women are men without money. 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
Economics is a choice between alternatives all the time. Those are the trade-offs. Paul Samuelson
It is dead wrong about necessary surplus of winnings over losings. 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
Let those who will – write the nation’s laws – if I can write its textbooks. Paul Samuelson
An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn’t called a decade of greed. 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
When I was a kid, I reckoned things in Hershey bars. Is this worth three Hershey bars to me? Paul Samuelson
Investing should be dull. It shouldn’t be exciting. Paul Samuelson
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. Paul Samuelson
Every good cause is worth some inefficiency. Paul Samuelson
