Paul Samuelson citations (56 citations)

Source: 1950s–1970s, Maximum Principles in Analytical Economics, 1970, p. 69
Contexte: 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. How many dreary papers have I had to referee in which the author is looking for something that corresponds to entropy or to one or another form of energy. Nonsensical laws, such as the law of conservation of purchasing power, represent spurious social science imitations of the important physical law of the conservation of energy; and when an economist makes reference to a Heisenberg Principle of indeterminacy in the social world, at best this must be regarded as a figure of speech or a play on words, rather than a valid application of the relations of quantum mechanics.

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

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Paul A. Samuelson

February 1985, in William Breit and Roger W. Spencer (ed.) Lives of the laureates
1980s–1990s
Contexte: I can claim that in talking about modern economics I am talking about me. My finger has been in every pie. I once claimed to be the last generalist in economics, writing about and teaching such diverse subjects as international trade and econometrics, economic theory and business cycles, demography and labor economics, finance and monopolistic competition, history of doctrines and locational economics.

“After 1929 it was the sturdy middle classes, and not just the lumpen proletariat, who were down and out. It was not all that unfashionable or disreputable to be bankrupt. By the last Hoover years, the states and localities had run out of money for relief. In middle-class neighborhoods like mine, you constantly had children at the door, asking by mouth or with a note for a dime, a quarter, or a potato: saying, in a believable fashion, we are starving.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

Samuelson (1985; p, 6) as cited in: Klein, Daniel B., and Ryan Daza. " Paul A. Samuelson (Ideological Profiles of the Economics Laureates). http://econjwatch.org/file_download/767/schultzipel.pdf" Econ Journal Watch 10.3 (2013): 561-569.
1980s–1990s

“I return to economics and to economists, and to the question of why the profession’s directions have evolved in the manners evident from this book. A major conservative economist once explained that a source of his antipathy to government traced back to the defeat of his southern ancestors by a larger north economy. Here is a similar factoid. Joan Robinson once wrote that her opposition to having the U. K. enter the European Market was due to the fact that she “had more friends in [Nehru’s] India than on the continent.””

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Paul A. Samuelson

Coeditor's Forword in Inside the economist’s mind: conversations with eminent economists (2007)
New millennium

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

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Paul A. Samuelson

Paul Samuelson (1966), quoted in: John C Bluedorn et al. Do Asset Price Drops Foreshadow Recessions? (2013), p. 4
1950s–1970s

“Often I’ve stated how I hate to be wrong. That has aborted many a tempting error, but not all of them. But I hate much more to stay wrong. Early on, I’ve learned to check back on earlier proclamations. One can learn much from one’s own errors and precious little from one’s triumphs. By September of 1945, it was becoming obvious that oversaving was not going to cause a deep and lasting post-war recession. So then and there, I cut my losses on that bad earlier estimate.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

New millennium, An Interview with Paul A. Samuelson, 2003

“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.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

Paul Samuelson in: Louis Uchitelle. " Franco Modigliani, 85, Nobel-Winning Economist, Dies http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/26/obituaries/26MODI.html" in New York Times, September 26, 2003.
New millennium

“An American economist of two generations ago, H. J. Davenport, who was the best friend Thorstein Veblen ever had (Veblen actually lived for a time in Davenport’s coal cellar) once said: “There is no reason why theoretical economics should be a monopoly of the reactionaries.” All my life I have tried to take this warning to heart, and I dare call it to your favorable attention.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

Source: 1950s–1970s, Maximum Principles in Analytical Economics, 1970, p. 76

“From the beginning I could not believe that the “efficient market” hypothesis was dependent on a pure Brownian motion white noise or any truly random random walk. Place a minuscule colloidal molecule on a horizontal table that covers unlimited acres. Bombard it from every direction with thousands of minute atoms; and then if you wait long enough that original molecule can have traveled a billion miles in one direction. That’s truly a random Bachelier-Einstein walk, but not my notion of economic fluctuations.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

New millennium, An Enjoyable Life Puzzling Over Modern Finance Theory, 2009

“In the preface to the reissue of Risk, Uncertainty and Proﬁt, Frank Knight makes the penetrating observation that under the conditions envisaged above the velocity of circulation would become inﬁnite and so would the price level. This is perhaps an over-dramatic way of saying that nobody would hold money, and it would become a free good to go into the category of shell and other things which once served as money. We should expect too that it would not only pass out of circulation, but it would cease to be used as a conventional numeraire in terms of which prices are expressed. Interest bearing money would emerge. Of course, the above does not happen in real life, precisely because uncertainty, contingency needs, non-synchronization of revenues and outlay, transaction frictions, etc., etc., all are with us. But the abstract special case analyzed above should warn us against the facile assumption that the average levels of the structure of interest rates are determined solely or primarily by these differential factors. At times they are primary, and at other times, such as the twenties in this country, they may not be. As a generalization I should hazard the hypothesis that they are likely to be of great importance in an economy in which there is a “quasi-zero" rate of interest. I think by this hypothesis one can explain many of the anomalies of the United States money market in the thirties.”

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Paul A. Samuelson livre Foundations of Economic Analysis

Source: 1940s, Foundations of Economic Analysis, 1947, Ch. 5 : Theory of Consumer’s Behavior

“The general method involved may be very simply stated. In cases where the equilibrium values of our variables can be regarded as the solutions of an extremum (maximum or minimum) problem, it is often possible regardless of the number of variables involved to determine unambiguously the qualitative behavior of our solution values in respect to changes of parameters.”

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Paul A. Samuelson livre Foundations of Economic Analysis

Source: 1940s, Foundations of Economic Analysis, 1947, Ch. 2 : The Theory of Maximizing Behavior

“It is some relief to move from the exalted realm of philosophical ethics to the mundane realm of scientific methodology. However, I rather shy away from discussions of Methodology with a capital M. To paraphrase Shaw: Those who can do science; those who can’t prattle about its methodology.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

“My Life Philosophy: Policy Credos and Working Ways,” in M. Szenberg (ed.) Eminent Economists: Their Life Philosophies (1992)
1980s–1990s

“The existence of analogies between central features of various theories implies the existence of a general theory which underlies the particular theories and unifies them with respect to those central features. This fundamental principle of generalization by abstraction was enunicated by the eminent American mathematician E. H. Moore more than thirty years ago. It is the purpose of the pages that follow to work out its implication for theoretical and applied economics.”

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Paul A. Samuelson livre Foundations of Economic Analysis

Source: 1940s, Foundations of Economic Analysis, 1947, Ch. 1 : Introduction

“The very name of my subject, economics, suggests economizing or maximizing. But Political Economy has gone a long way beyond home economics. Indeed, it is only in the last third of the century, within my own lifetime as a scholar, that economic theory has had many pretensions to being itself useful to the practical businessman or bureaucrat. I seem to recall that a great economist of the last generation, A. C. Pigou of Cambridge University, once asked the rhetorical question, “Who would ever think of employing an economist to run a brewery?” Well, today, under the guise of operational research and managerial economics, the fanciest of our economic tools are being utilized in enterprises both public and private.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

Source: 1950s–1970s, Maximum Principles in Analytical Economics, 1970, p. 62: Lead paragraph

“I had a great admiration for Pigou. I thought that, in many ways, he was not only a faithful follower of Alfred Marshall, but he was also a more fertile developer of the Marshallian tradition than Marshall himself. … Whitehead said to me:“Don’t you think that Pigou was an overrated economist? Wasn’t Foxwell a better man?” Since I am an honest man, I said to Whitehead:“No, I think Pigou was a much more important economist than Foxwell.””

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Paul A. Samuelson

Kotaro Suzumura, An interview with Paul Samuelson: welfare economics,“old” and “new”, and social choice theory (2005)
New millennium

“I reproach myself for a gross error. But I would reproach myself more if I had persisted in an error after observations revealed it clearly to be that. I made a deal of money in the late 1940s on the bull side, ignoring Satchel Paige’s advice to Lot’s wife, “Never look back.” Rather I would advocate Samuelson’s Law: “Always look back. You may learn something from your residuals. Usually one’s forecasts are not so good as one remembers them; the difference may be instructive.” The dictum “If you must forecast, forecast often,” is neither a joke nor a confession of impotence. It is a recognition of the primacy of brute fact over pretty theory. That part of the future that cannot be related to the present’s past is precisely what science cannot hope to capture. Fortunately, there is plenty of work for science to do, plenty of scientific tasks not yet done.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

February 1985, in William Breit and Roger W. Spencer (ed.) Lives of the laureates
1980s–1990s

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

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Paul A. Samuelson

Samuelson's Economics at Fifty: Remarks on the Occasion of the Anniversary of Publication (1998)
1980s–1990s

“An evolving discipline–whether it be history or economics or astrophysics or immunology–is ever dynamically changing. Two steps forward and X steps back, so to speak. Periodically, the scholarly group registers more or less self-confidence, self-esteem, and complacency. We careerists are happiest when recent past achievements have seemed to be successful, but when still there are completable tasks dimly visible ahead.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

"Foreword: Eavesdropping on the Future?" in New Frontiers in Economics (2004)
New millennium

“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.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

Paul Samuelson, Tjalling Koopmans, and Richard Stone. "Report of the evaluative committee for Econometrica." Econometrica- journal of the Econometric Society. (1954): 141-146.
1950s–1970s

“Well, I'd say, and this is probably a change from what I would have said when I was younger: Have a very healthy respect for the study of economic history, because that's the raw material out of which any of your conjectures or testings will come. And I think the recent period has illustrated that. The governor of the Bank of England seems to have forgotten or not known that there was no bank insurance in England, so when Northern Rock got a run, he was surprised. Well, he shouldn't have been.
But history doesn't tell its own story. You've got to bring to it all the statistical testings that are possible. And we have a lot more information now than we used to.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

Conor Clarke, An Interview With Paul Samuelson http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/06/an-interview-with-paul-samuelson-part-two/19627/, Part Two (2009)
New millennium

“Well, I will say this. And this is the main thing to remember. Macroeconomics -- even with all of our computers and with all of our information -- is not an exact science and is incapable of being an exact science. It can be better or it can be worse, but there isn't guaranteed predictability in these matters.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

Conor Clarke, An Interview With Paul Samuelson, Part One http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/06/an-interview-with-paul-samuelson-part-one/19572/ (2009)
New millennium