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Let those who will write the nation's laws, if I can write its textbooks.

Paul Samuelson

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Paul Samuelson
Age: 94 †
Born: 1915
Born: May 15
Died: 2009
Died: December 13
Economist
University Teacher
Gary
Indiana
Paul Anthony Samuelson
Paul A. Samuelson
Law
Nations
Write
Writing
Textbooks
Laws
Teaching
Nation

More quotes by Paul Samuelson

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I couldn't reconcile what I was being taught at the university of Chicago, the lectures and the books I was being assigned, with what I knew to be true out in the streets.
Paul Samuelson
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If we made an income pyramid out of a child's blocks, with each layer portraying $1,000 of income, the peak would be far higher than the Eiffel Tower, but almost all of us would be within a yard of the ground.
Paul Samuelson
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Mea culpa, mea culpa. MIT and Wharton and University of Chicago created the financial engineering instruments, which, like Samson and Delilah, blinded every CEO. They didn't realize the kind of leverage they were doing and they didn't understand when they were really creating a real profit or a fictitious one.
Paul Samuelson
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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.
Paul Samuelson
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By keeping labor supply down, immigration policy tends to keep wages high. Let us underline this basic principle: Limitation of the supply of any grade of labor relative to all other productive factors can be expected to raise its wage rate and increase in supply will, other things being equal, tend to depress wage rates.
Paul Samuelson
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You could be disqualified for a job [at Harvard] if you were either smart or Jewish or Keynesian. So what chance did this smart, Jewish, Keynesian have?
Paul Samuelson
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It isn't that greed's increased. What's increased is the realization that you've got a free field to reach out for what you'd like to do.
Paul Samuelson
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Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear - and what they want to hear is what won't happen.
Paul Samuelson
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The stock market has predicted nine of the last five recessions.
Paul Samuelson
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Companies are not charitable enterprises: They hire workers to make profits. In the United States, this logic still works. In Europe, it hardly does.
Paul Samuelson
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Our ideal society finds it essential to put a rent on land as a way of maximizing the total consumption available to the society. ...Pure land rent is in the nature of a 'surplus' which can be taxed heavily without distorting production incentives or efficiency. A land value tax can be called 'the useful tax on measured land surplus'.
Paul Samuelson
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When the economy was going up, [Milton Friedman and I] both gave the same advice, and when the economy was going down, we gave the same advice. But in between he didn't change his advice at all.
Paul Samuelson
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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.
Paul Samuelson
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The failure of market catallactics in no way denies the following truth: given sufficient knowledge the optimal decisions can always be found by scanning over all the attainable states of the world and selecting the one which according to the postulated ethical welfare function is best. The solution 'exists' the problem is how to 'find' it.
Paul Samuelson
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Profits are the lifeblood of the economic system, the magic elixir upon which progress and all good things depend ultimately. But one man's lifeblood is another man's cancer.
Paul Samuelson
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What good does it do a black youth to know that an employer must pay him $2 an hour if the fact that he must be paid that amount is what keeps him from getting a job?
Paul Samuelson
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I don't care very much for the People Magazine approach to applied economics.
Paul Samuelson
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Second, they [those who disagree with market efficiency] always claim they know a man, a bank, or a fund that does do better. Alas, anecdotes are not science. And once Wharton School dissertations seek to quantify the performers, these have a tendency to evaporate into the air - or, at least, into statistically insignificant t-statistics.
Paul Samuelson
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Man does not live by GNP alone.
Paul Samuelson
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Two factors explain our success. One, MIT's renaissance after World War II as a federally supported research resource. Two, the mathematical revolution in macro- and micro-economic theory and statistics. This was overdue and inevitable, MIT was the logical place for it to flourish.
Paul Samuelson