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 Read Quote
Often, when I became a consultant to a federal agency, that precipitated its demise. Paul Samuelson Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
