I think that it’s more important for an economist to be wise and sophisticated in scientific method than it is for a physicist because with controlled laboratory experiments possible, they practically guide you; you couldn’t go astray. Whereas in economics, by dogma and misunderstanding, you can go very sadly astray. Paul Samuelson Read Quote
Actually, in my advanced, high-falutin’ frontier economics, I often work with what I define as ‘money metric utility,’ and I ask people, ‘Do you really want that? What are you willing to pay for that?’ Paul Samuelson Read Quote
I can tell you, because I serve on so many nonprofit boards – where half of us are academics and half of us are from Wall Street – that there’s no CEO who understands at all a derivative. All they know is that somebody tells them in their organization, ‘We’ve got a wonderful profit center.’ Paul Samuelson Read Quote
I did not throw out my education lightly, but what I was being taught was of no use in explaining what I saw around me. It was the Great Depression. Paul Samuelson Read Quote
Keynes’s contribution was not just to advocate spending government money in the middle of a recession. Every government had done that going back to the days of the Irish potato famine. What he gave to us was a way of thinking about the magnitude and the dimensions and so forth. Paul Samuelson Read Quote
Charles Darwin got his theory, his notion of natural selection, evolution, and so did its independent discoverer, Alfred Wallace, from reading Malthus. Paul Samuelson Read Quote
Today we see how utterly mistaken was the Milton Friedman notion that a market system can regulate itself… Everyone understands now, on the contrary, that there can be no solution without government. Paul Samuelson Read Quote
Time is our ultimate scarcity. Isaac Newton can give us more electricity, but he can’t give us more than 24 hours of the day of time. And so we’re constantly having to sacrifice alternate activities to get the one that pleases us most. Paul Samuelson Read Quote
The very name of my subject, economics, suggests economizing or maximizing. But Political Economy has gone a long way beyond home economics. Paul Samuelson Read Quote
A temporary reduction in tax rates on individual incomes can be a powerful weapon against recession. Paul Samuelson Read Quote
