Paul Samuelson Quotes - Page 3

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• 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

  Decision, World, Way

  Paul Anthony Samuelson (1966). “The Collected Scientific Papers of Paul A. Samuelson”, p.1225, MIT Press

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

  Paul Samuelson

  Teaching, Writing, Law

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• Man does not live by GNP alone.

  Paul Samuelson

  Men, Doe, Economics

  Paul Anthony Samuelson, William Samuelson (1980). “Economics”, McGraw-Hill Companies

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• 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

  Hands, Survival, Elbows

  Paul Anthony Samuelson (1973). “The Samuelson sampler”

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• Second, they [those who disagree with market efficiency] always claim they know a man, a bank, or a fund that does do better. Alas, anecdotes are not science. And once Wharton School dissertations seek to quantify the performers, these have a tendency to evaporate into the air - or, at least, into statistically insignificant t-statistics.

  Paul Samuelson

  School, Men, Air

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• You could be disqualified for a job [at Harvard] if you were either smart or Jewish or Keynesian. So what chance did this smart, Jewish, Keynesian have?

  Paul Samuelson

  Jobs, Smart, Chance

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• 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

  Real, Engineering, Creating

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• What good does it do a black youth to know that an employer must pay him $2 an hour if the fact that he must be paid that amount is what keeps him from getting a job?

  Paul Samuelson

  Jobs, Black Youth, Doe

  Paul A. Samuelson, Anthony Scott (1975). “Economics”

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• 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

  Investing, Tests, Able

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• 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

  Two, Hindsight, Century

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• By keeping labor supply down, immigration policy tends to keep wages high. Let us underline this basic principle: Limitation of the supply of any grade of labor relative to all other productive factors can be expected to raise its wage rate; and increase in supply will, other things being equal, tend to depress wage rates.

  Paul Samuelson

  Depressing, Principles, Immigration

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• 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

  Land, Essentials, Incentives

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• 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

  Running, Luck, Gold

  Paul Anthony Samuelson (1986). “Coll Sci Pap V5”, p.561, MIT Press

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• 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

  War, Two, Mit

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• I don't care very much for the People Magazine approach to applied economics.

  Paul Samuelson

  People, Magazines, Care

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• 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

  Cancer, Common Sense, Effort

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• 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

  Investing, Able, Portfolios

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• 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

  Children, Memories, Doors

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• That's what I would like to do until the end of time, to go on scribbling my articles on the third floor of the Sloan Building, in between playing tennis and drinking coffee at my other study in the Concord Avenue branch of Burger King.

  Paul Samuelson

  Kings, Drinking, Coffee

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

  Paul Samuelson

  Government, Two, Democracy

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• 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.

  Paul Samuelson

  Giving, Special, Investing

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• Even if this advice to portfolio decision makers to drop dead is good advice, it obviously is not counsel that will be eagerly followed. Few people will commit suicide without a push. And fewer still will pay good money to be told to do what is against human nature and self-interest to do.

  Paul Samuelson

  Suicide, Self, People

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• 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

  Beach, Years, Class

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• 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

  Japan, Self, Hype

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• 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

  Boys, Libertarian, Trouble

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