Frases de Paul Samuelson

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“Tarde o temprano, Internet se convertirá en rentable, es una vieja historia antes hecha por los ferrocarriles y los automóviles.”

“Toda buena causa es un valor aproximado de la ineficiencia.”

“La globalización supone un crecimiento económico sostenido. En caso contrario, el proceso pierde sus beneficios económicos y su apoyo político.”

“Como nunca antes en la historia económica, hoy existe una vasta pirámide de opciones y pases. Cuando el cielo está sereno, esto les permite a los inversores distribuir sus riesgos eficientemente.”

“La inversión debe ser más como esperar que la pintura se seque o que la hierba crezca. Si quieres emoción, toma 800 dólares y ve a Las Vegas.”

“(…) Descubrí que había que de nuevo incluso los gráficos tradicionales de la economía si queríamos que la "sombría ciencia de la economía" se convirtiera en la apasionante disciplina que realmente era.”

“Buenas preguntas logran respuestas fácilmente.”

“El consumidor, como se dice, es el rey… Cada uno es un votante que utiliza su dinero como voto para obtener las cosas que quiere.”

“El mercado de valores ha previsto nueve de las últimas cinco recesiones”

“La economía no es una ciencia exacta. Cualquier pronóstico basado en evidencias puede salir horriblemente mal.”

“La economía nunca ha sido una ciencia, y es aún menos ahora que hace unos años.”

“Las empresas no son instituciones de beneficencia que contratan trabajadores para realizar actos caritativos.”

“Lo que sabemos de la crisis financiera mundial es que no sabemos mucho.”

“Los derechos de propiedad intelectual suelen hacer mejor a algunos (las empresas farmacéuticas) y mucho peor a otros (los que de otro modo podrían haber sido capaces de comprar los medicamentos).”

“Los economistas verdaderos no hablan de competitividad.”

“Los precios que ahora pagamos por la gasolina quizás parezcan altos, pero todavía no están ajustados en lo más mínimo al nivel mundial del precio del petróleo.”

“Los sistemas de mercado no regulados acaban destruyéndose a sí mismos. ¿Ha llegado el sistema de mercado a su fin? Como persona apegada a los valores tradicionales, espero que no. Mil años de historia económica atestiguan objetivamente lo indispensables que son los sistemas de mercado.”

“Todas las malas experiencias enseñan algo útil.”

“Trato de ser realista: ni optimista ni pesimista.”

“Una mente fría al servicio de un corazón caliente.”

“Un primer curso de economía no permite dominar todos sus intrincados y esotéricos temas, pero puedo decirle basándome en la experiencia de estudiantes de todo el mundo que el mejor curso de economía es el de introducción. Una vez que haya entrado este nuevo y extraño jardín de ideas, el mundo nunca será igual. Y cuando dentro de unos años recuerde la experiencia, incluso lo que no entendía mucho entonces habrá madurado claramente.”

“Moral: To understand economics you need to know not only fundamentals but also its nuances. Darwin is in the nuances. When someone preaches “Economics in one lesson,” I advise: Go back for the second lesson.”

“Globalization presumes sustained economic growth. Otherwise, the process loses its economic benefits and political support.”

“Figure 12-6 pulls together in a simplified way the main elements of income determination. Without saving and investment, there would be a circular flow of income between business and the public: above, business pays out wages, interest, rents, and profits to the public in return for the services of labor and property; and below, the public pays consumption dollars to business in return for goods and services.
Realistically, we must recognize that the public will wish to save some of its income, as shown at the spigot Z. Hence, businesses cannot expect their consumption sales to be as large as the total of wages, interest, rents, and profits.”

“What then is it that, since 2007, has caused Wall Street capitalism's own suicide? At the bottom of this worst financial mess in a century is this: Milton Friedman-Friedrich Hayek libertarian laissez-faire capitalism, permitted to run wild without regulation. This is the root source of today's travails. Both of these men are dead, but their poisoned legacies live on.”

“My mind is ever toying with economic ideas and relationships. Great novelists and poets have reported occasional abandonment by their muse. The well runs dry, permanently or on occasion. Mine has been a better luck. As I have written elsewhere, there is a vast inventory of topics and problems floating in the back of my mind. More perhaps than I shall ever have occasion to write up for publication. A result that I notice in statistical mechanics may someday help resolve a problem in finance.”

“Economics never was a dismal science. It should be a realistic science.”

“The proof of the pudding is in the eating. There was a widespread myth of the 1970s, a myth along Tom Kuhn’s (1962) Structure of Scientific Revolutions lines. The Keynesianism, which worked so well in Camelot and brought forth a long epoch of price-level stability with good Q growth and nearly full employment, gave way to a new and quite different macro view after 1966. A new paradigm, monistic monetarism, so the tale narrates, gave a better fit. And therefore King Keynes lost self esteem and public esteem. The King is dead. Long live King Milton!
Contemplate the true facts. Examine 10 prominent best forecasting models 1950 to 1980: Wharton, Townsend–Greenspan, Michigan Model, St. Louis Reserve Bank, Citibank Economic Department under Walter Wriston’s choice of Lief Olson, et cetera. … M did matter as for almost everyone. But never did M alone matter systemically, as post-1950 Friedman monetarism professed.”

“I used to joke to Bob Solow that the distance between me and Joan Robinson is less than the distance between Joan Robinson and me. His reply was, “You’ll never convince her of that.””

“We economists love to quote Keynes’s final lines in his 1936 General Theory—for the reason that they cater so well to our vanity and self-importance. But to admit the truth, madmen in authority can self generate their own frenzies without needing help from either defunct or avant-garde economists. What establishment economists brew up is as often what the Prince and the Public are already wanting to imbibe. We guys don’t stay in the best club by proffering the views of some past academic crank or academic sage.”

“As a theorist I have great advantages. All I need is a pencil (now a ball pen) and an empty pad of paper. There are analysts who sit and look vacantly out the window, but after the age of 20 I was not one of them. I ought to envy the new generation who have grown up with the computer, but I don’t. None of them known to me sits idly at the console, improvising and experimenting in the way that a composer does at the piano. That ought to become increasingly possible. But up to now, in my observation, the computer is largely a black box into which researchers feed raw input and out of from which they draw various summarizing measures and simulations. Not having access to look around in the box, the investigator has less intuitive familiarity with the data than used to be the case in the bad old days.”

“With the assistance of mathematics, I can see a property of the ninety-nine dimensional surfaces hidden from the naked eye. If an increase in the price of fertilizer alone always increases the amount the firm buys of caviar, from that fact alone I can predict the answer to the following experiment which I have never seen performed and upon which I have no observations: an increase in the price of caviar alone will increase the amount the firm buys of fertilizer. In thermodynamics such reciprocity or integrability conditions are known as Maxwell Conditions; in economics they are known as Hotelling conditions in honor of Harold Hotelling’s 1932 work.”

“Here is my advice. When in doubt, give my new efforts a hearing. Many feel a calling to break new ground; in the end, few will end upfinding their efforts chosen. But the yea-sayer does do less harm than the naysayer, in that the Darwinian process of adverse testing will in time (most likely?) separate the useful from the useless, the trivial from the profound.”

“I was lucky to enter economics in 1932. Analytical economics was poised for its take-off. I faced a lovely vacuum that young economists today can hardly imagine. So much remained to be done. Everything was still in an imperfect state. It was like fishing in a virgin lake: a whopper at every cast, but so many lovely new specimens that the palate never cloyed.”

“Just as Hegel is said to have understood his philosophy for the first time when he read its French translation, Vilfredo Pareto could have learned what it was he meant exactly to say when he read Bergson's 1938 classic.”

“Science is not art. Yet, despite the lack of complete identity between art and science, there is much in common among different creative processes.”

“Scholars still debate whether Columbus brought syphilis to the New World or vice versa. But it cannot be doubted that the 2008 world meltdown carries on its label the words Made in America.”