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Paul Samuelson Quotes

1915–2009 United States

Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009) was an American economist. He was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

United States
Academics
Economists
Nobel laureates

Also known as: Paul A. Samuelson, Samuelson, Paul

Random Paul Samuelson quote

45 quotes

What sex is to the biology classroom, stocks and investment riskiness is to the sophomore economics lecture hall.

Samuelson's Economics at Fifty: Remarks on the Occasion of the Anniversary of Publication (1998)

When finally mastered, its analysis is found to be obvious and at the same time new. In short, it is a work of genius.

The stock market has forecast nine of the last five recessions.

Economic theory is a mistress of even too tempting grace.

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.

There is really nothing more pathetic than to have an economist or a retired engineer try to force analogies between the concepts of physics and the concepts of economics.

I can claim that in talking about modern economics I am talking about me. My finger has been in every pie.

I tell no secret when I repeat that fame and reputation are much a matter of luck and chance.

Samuelson's Economics at Fifty: Remarks on the Occasion of the Anniversary of Publication (1998)

Economics, even classical economics, is not a finished business. There are still issues relevant to the present debate that have not been definitively explored.

No two business cycles are quite the same; yet they all have much in common. They are not identical twins, but they are recognizable as belonging to the same family.

Error is a virus that tends to spread. As I have already hinted, the categories of circulating capital and of the wage fund tended and still tend to get confounded together.

Modigliani's theory was a powerful searchlight on what was happening... It is the best explanation of what has actually been happening in the great swing of American life since the 1950's.

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.

Economics never was a dismal science. It should be a realistic science.

Carry the notion of the individual to its limit and you get a monstrosity, just as you do if you carry the notion of a group to its limit.

Like a farmer using a carrot and a stick to coax a donkey forward, the market system deals out profits and losses to induce firms to produce desired goods efficiently.

Orthodox biologists are like orthodox economists. When confronted by tensions between their paradigms and reality, they work to explain away the aberrations.

The competitive price system uses supply-demand markets to solve the trio of economic problems — What How, and For Whom All demand relations are shown in blue. all the supply relations, in black.

Economics is the study of how societies use scarce resources to produce valuable goods and services and distribute them among different individuals

Scholars still debate whether Columbus brought syphilis to the New World or vice versa. But it cannot be doubted that the 2008 world meltdown carries on its label the words Made in America.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Paul Samuelson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.