Quote

You know what happiness is: 'Having a little more money than your colleagues.' And that's not so tough in academic life.

Paul Samuelson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Academic
Tough
Happiness
Money
Littles
Little
Life
Colleagues

More quotes by Paul Samuelson

Image
An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed.
Paul Samuelson
Image
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
Image
Every good cause is worth some inefficiency.
Paul Samuelson
Image
The stock market has predicted nine of the last five recessions.
Paul Samuelson
Image
I don't care who writes a nation's laws - or crafts its advanced treaties - if I can write its economics textbooks.
Paul Samuelson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.
Paul Samuelson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We're a me-me-me generation. We're borrowing the savings of every nation in the world. We're ... piling up a big tab. Now, I may think we're too big to have a run on us. You may think that. But it's possible that God does not.
Paul Samuelson
Image
Good questions outrank easy answers.
Paul Samuelson
Image
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
Image
Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear - and what they want to hear is what won't happen.
Paul Samuelson
Image
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