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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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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
World
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Solutions
Ethical
Truth
Following
Solution
Problem
Market
Sufficient
Postulated
States
Function
Welfare
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Failure
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Way
Knowledge
Deny
Optimal
Always
Given
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More quotes by Paul Samuelson

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Marshall's crime is to pretend to handle imperfect competition with tools only applicable to perfect competition.
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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Good questions outrank easy answers.
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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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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In every mutual fund prospectus, in every sales promotional folder, and in every mutual fund advertisement (albeit in print almost too small to read), the following warning appears: Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Paul Samuelson
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We are like highly trained athletes, who never run a race.
Paul Samuelson
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First, those who disagree with market efficiency simply assert that it stands to common sense that greater effort to get facts and greater acumen in analyzing those facts will pay off in better performance somehow measured. (By this logic, cure for cancer must have been found by 1955).
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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I don't care very much for the People Magazine approach to applied economics.
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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Two-thirds of a century after [The Road to Serfdom] got written, hindsight confirms how inaccurate its innuendo about the future turned out to be.
Paul Samuelson
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Every good cause is worth some inefficiency.
Paul Samuelson
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Investing is like waiting for paint dry and grass grow so. If you like fun, let handle 800 USD and headed to Las Vegas
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
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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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In this age of specialization, I sometimes think of myself as the last 'generalist' in economics, with interests that range from mathematical economics down to current financial journalism. My real interests are research and teaching.
Paul Samuelson
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Asia's governments come in two broad varieties: young, fragile democracies - and older, fragile authoritarian regimes.
Paul Samuelson
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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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There is something in people you might even call it a little bit of a gambling instinct… I tell people investing should be dull. It shouldn't be exciting. Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.
Paul Samuelson