159 Quotes by Paul Samuelson

What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don’t know very much.

Thousands of important and intelligent men have never been able to grasp the principle of comparative advantage or believe it even after it was explained to them.

Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear – and what they want to hear is what won’t happen.

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

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.

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.

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.

Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It’s an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.

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...