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For better or worse, US Keynesianism was so far ahead of where it started. I am a cafeteria Keynesian. You know what a cafeteria catholic is?

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
Keynesianism
Keynesian
Cafeteria
Ahead
Catholic
Worse
Started
Better

More quotes by 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.
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Funeral by funeral, theory advances.
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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.
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An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed.
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Man does not live by GNP alone.
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I don't care who writes a nation's laws - or crafts its advanced treaties - if I can write its economics textbooks.
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The stock market has predicted nine of the last five recessions.
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.
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Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.
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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?
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We are like highly trained athletes, who never run a race.
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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.
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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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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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You know what happiness is: 'Having a little more money than your colleagues.' And that's not so tough in academic life.
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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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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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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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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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