Quote

I'm not sure most of the people that get caught up in the middle of a bubble can be described as irrational. It seems pretty rational to buy a house and flip it in the next few weeks at a profit when that's been happening for along time.

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
Time
Along
Described
People
Week
Irrational
Pretty
Weeks
Middle
Rational
Sure
Happenings
House
Profit
Bubble
Next
Happening
Flip
Seems
Caught
Bubbles

More quotes by Paul Samuelson

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The consumer, so it is said, is the king each is a voter who uses his money as votes to get the things done that he wants done.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Perhaps there really are managers who can outperform the market consistently - logic would suggest that they exist. But they are remarkably well-hidden.
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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We are like highly trained athletes, who never run a race.
Paul Samuelson
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An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed.
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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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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Asia's governments come in two broad varieties: young, fragile democracies - and older, fragile authoritarian regimes.
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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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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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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Marshall's crime is to pretend to handle imperfect competition with tools only applicable to perfect competition.
Paul Samuelson