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Paul Samuelson citations
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Paul Anthony Samuelson est un économiste américain, prix Nobel d'économie en 1970 et chef de file de l'école qu'il appela la « synthèse néo-classique », qui entendait reprendre à son compte à la fois les théories de Keynes en macroéconomie et les enseignements néoclassiques en microéconomie.

Samuelson est, avec John Hicks, considéré comme « le père » de la microéconomie traditionnelle actuelle. Certains de ses pairs – dont Kenneth Arrow et Jagdish Bhagwati – le considèrent comme le plus grand économiste de tous les temps. Wikipedia  

✵ 15. mai 1915 – 13. décembre 2009  •  Autres noms Пол Самуэльсон
Paul Samuelson photo
Paul Samuelson: 56 citations0 J'aime

Paul Samuelson citations célèbres

“L’économique est un sujet important et qui, à en juger par notre expérience personnelle, peut également être un sujet passionnant. L’économique, par exemple, traite de l’inflation ou de la déflation ou encore elle se demande pourquoi quelques particuliers jouissent de grandes fortunes, alors que d’autres individus, encore plus nombreux, végètent dans un état de pauvreté abjecte. Or, l’intérêt d’une recherche scientifique est évidemment porté à son plus haut point quand celle-ci vise à résoudre des problèmes d’actualité brûlante. C’est parce que – à notre époque où les villes deviennent invivables où les environnements sont de plus en plus pollués, où l’inflation fait fondre le pouvoir d’achat de la monnaie – l’économie politique est appelée à jouer un rôle important dans toute éducation bien comprise.”

Paul Samuelson

L'Economique, 1972

“…il serait toujours nécessaire – comme dans toute science – de simplifier et d’abstraire à partir de la masse infinie des détails concrets. Aucun esprit ne peut embrasser une multiplicité de faits décousus. Toute analyse implique un effort d’abstraction.”

Paul Samuelson

L'Economique, 1972

“La science est un véritable parasite : plus le nombre des patients est élevé, plus la physiologie et la pathologie progressent, et donc meilleurs sont les résultats thérapeutiques obtenus. L’année 1932 marque le moment le plus noir de la grande dépression et c’est de son cadre honni qu’a progressivement émergé la nouvelle discipline que nous appelons aujourd’hui la macroéconomie.”

Paul Samuelson

Déclaration de Paul Anthony Samuelson.

“L’économique est, non pas une discipline achevée, mais une science elle-même toujours en voie de développement.”

Paul Samuelson

L'Economique, 1972

“…un nouveau prix Nobel d’économie politique a été créé en 1969, comme pour commémorer l’accession de l’économique à la majorité scientifique.
En raison de la complexité des comportements humains et sociaux, nous ne saurions espérer rivaliser de précision avec certaines des sciences physiques. Nous ne pouvons nous livrer, comme le chimiste ou le biologiste, à des expériences contrôlées, mais, à l’instar de l’astronome, nous (économiste) devons nous contenter essentiellement « d’observer ». Malheureusement, les événements économiques et les données statistiques observées ne sont pas aussi disciplinés et réguliers que les mouvements des corps célestes. Par bonheur, toutefois, il n’est aucunement nécessaire que l’exactitude de nos réponses soit poussée à plusieurs décimales : si nous arrivions seulement à déterminer la véritable direction générale des causes et des effets, nous aurions déjà accompli, ce faisant, un énorme pas en avant.”

Paul Samuelson

L'Economique, 1972

“C’est un livre mal écrit, mal construit, et tout profane attiré par la renommée de son auteur se fait escroquer de cinq shillings en achetant cet ouvrage plein de confusion et d’erreurs…Dans la Théorie générale, le système keynésien ne se dégage que de façon floue, comme si son auteur était à peine conscient de son existence et instruit de ses propriétés. Des discours algébriques assommants sont émaillés de vues pénétrantes et d’intuitions profondes. Une définition maladroite donne soudain naissance à un passage inoubliable…Je ne crois pas trahir de secret en disant que personne d’autres à Cambridge (dans le Massachussets) ne savait de quoi il retournait, douze à dix-huit mois après sa publication. En fait, jusqu’à ce qu’apparaissent les modèles mathématiques de Meade, Lange, Hicks et Harrod, on a tout lieu de croire que Keynes lui-même n’avait pas vraiment compris sa propre analyse.”

Paul Samuelson

Déclaration de Paul Anthony Samuelson sur la Théorie générale.

“Bien entendu, tout pays est sous-développé en ce sens que, n’étant pas encore parvenu à épuiser ses possibilités virtuelles il est capable de continuer à avancer dans la voie du progrès technique.”

Paul Samuelson

L'Economique, 1972

“L’économie recherche comment les hommes et la société décident, en faisant ou non usage de la monnaie, d’affecter des ressources productives rares à la production à travers le temps, de marchandises et services variés et de répartir ceux-ci, à des fins de consommation présentes ou futures, entre les différents individus et collectivités constituants la société.”

Paul Samuelson

L'Economique, 1972

“La macroéconomie traite du tableau d’ensemble – à savoir des « macroagrégats » constitués par le revenu national, le volume de l’emploi et les niveaux généraux des prix.”

Paul Samuelson

L'Economique, 1972

Paul Samuelson: Citations en anglais

“My notion of a fruitful economic science would be that it can help us explain and understand the course of actual economic history. A scholar who seriously addresses commentary on contemporary monthly and yearly events is, in this view, practicing the study of history—history in its most contemporary time phasing.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

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

“Moral: To understand economics you need to know not only fundamentals but also its nuances. Darwin is in the nuances. When someone preaches “Economics in one lesson,” I advise: Go back for the second lesson.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

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

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

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Paul A. Samuelson

Quoted in: Richard Duncan (2011) The Dollar Crisis, p. 232
New millennium

“Figure 12-6 pulls together in a simplified way the main elements of income determination. Without saving and investment, there would be a circular flow of income between business and the public: above, business pays out wages, interest, rents, and profits to the public in return for the services of labor and property; and below, the public pays consumption dollars to business in return for goods and services.
Realistically, we must recognize that the public will wish to save some of its income, as shown at the spigot Z. Hence, businesses cannot expect their consumption sales to be as large as the total of wages, interest, rents, and profits.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

8th ed., 1970, p. 218
1940s, Economics (1948-)

“What then is it that, since 2007, has caused Wall Street capitalism's own suicide? At the bottom of this worst financial mess in a century is this: Milton Friedman-Friedrich Hayek libertarian laissez-faire capitalism, permitted to run wild without regulation. This is the root source of today's travails. Both of these men are dead, but their poisoned legacies live on.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

Farewell to Friedman-Hayek Libertarian Capitalism (2008)
New millennium

“My mind is ever toying with economic ideas and relationships. Great novelists and poets have reported occasional abandonment by their muse. The well runs dry, permanently or on occasion. Mine has been a better luck. As I have written elsewhere, there is a vast inventory of topics and problems floating in the back of my mind. More perhaps than I shall ever have occasion to write up for publication. A result that I notice in statistical mechanics may someday help resolve a problem in finance.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

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

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

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Paul A. Samuelson

[Samuelson, Paul Anthony, Puttaswamaiah, K., 2002, Paul Samuelson and the Foundations of Modern Economics, 10 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_Lvflq4Wv-wC&amp;lpg=PP1&amp;pg=PA10] <br class="br">New millennium

“The proof of the pudding is in the eating. There was a widespread myth of the 1970s, a myth along Tom Kuhn’s (1962) Structure of Scientific Revolutions lines. The Keynesianism, which worked so well in Camelot and brought forth a long epoch of price-level stability with good Q growth and nearly full employment, gave way to a new and quite different macro view after 1966. A new paradigm, monistic monetarism, so the tale narrates, gave a better fit. And therefore King Keynes lost self esteem and public esteem. The King is dead. Long live King Milton!
Contemplate the true facts. Examine 10 prominent best forecasting models 1950 to 1980: Wharton, Townsend–Greenspan, Michigan Model, St. Louis Reserve Bank, Citibank Economic Department under Walter Wriston’s choice of Lief Olson, et cetera. … M did matter as for almost everyone. But never did M alone matter systemically, as post-1950 Friedman monetarism professed.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

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

“I used to joke to Bob Solow that the distance between me and Joan Robinson is less than the distance between Joan Robinson and me. His reply was, “You’ll never convince her of that.””

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Paul A. Samuelson

Still one lives in hope.
On April 14, 1972, quoted in Marjorie Shepherd Turner, Joan Robinson and the Americans (1989)
1950s–1970s

“We economists love to quote Keynes’s final lines in his 1936 General Theory—for the reason that they cater so well to our vanity and self-importance. But to admit the truth, madmen in authority can self generate their own frenzies without needing help from either defunct or avant-garde economists. What establishment economists brew up is as often what the Prince and the Public are already wanting to imbibe. We guys don’t stay in the best club by proffering the views of some past academic crank or academic sage.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

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

“As a theorist I have great advantages. All I need is a pencil (now a ball pen) and an empty pad of paper. There are analysts who sit and look vacantly out the window, but after the age of 20 I was not one of them. I ought to envy the new generation who have grown up with the computer, but I don’t. None of them known to me sits idly at the console, improvising and experimenting in the way that a composer does at the piano. That ought to become increasingly possible. But up to now, in my observation, the computer is largely a black box into which researchers feed raw input and out of from which they draw various summarizing measures and simulations. Not having access to look around in the box, the investigator has less intuitive familiarity with the data than used to be the case in the bad old days.”

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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

“With the assistance of mathematics, I can see a property of the ninety-nine dimensional surfaces hidden from the naked eye. If an increase in the price of fertilizer alone always increases the amount the firm buys of caviar, from that fact alone I can predict the answer to the following experiment which I have never seen performed and upon which I have no observations: an increase in the price of caviar alone will increase the amount the firm buys of fertilizer. In thermodynamics such reciprocity or integrability conditions are known as Maxwell Conditions; in economics they are known as Hotelling conditions in honor of Harold Hotelling’s 1932 work.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

Source: 1950s–1970s, Maximum Principles in Analytical Economics, 1970, p. 67

“Here is my advice. When in doubt, give my new efforts a hearing. Many feel a calling to break new ground; in the end, few will end upfinding their efforts chosen. But the yea-sayer does do less harm than the naysayer, in that the Darwinian process of adverse testing will in time (most likely?) separate the useful from the useless, the trivial from the profound.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

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

“I was lucky to enter economics in 1932. Analytical economics was poised for its take-off. I faced a lovely vacuum that young economists today can hardly imagine. So much remained to be done. Everything was still in an imperfect state. It was like fishing in a virgin lake: a whopper at every cast, but so many lovely new specimens that the palate never cloyed.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

Introduction to the Enlarged Edition
1940s, Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947; 1983)

“Just as Hegel is said to have understood his philosophy for the first time when he read its French translation, Vilfredo Pareto could have learned what it was he meant exactly to say when he read Bergson's 1938 classic.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

Introduction to the Enlarged Edition
1940s, Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947; 1983)

“Science is not art. Yet, despite the lack of complete identity between art and science, there is much in common among different creative processes.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

Introduction to the Enlarged Edition
1940s, Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947; 1983)

“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.”

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Paul A. Samuelson

"Farewell to Friedman-Hayek Libertarian Capitalism", Tribune Media Services (2008)
New millennium

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