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Keynes's contribution was not just to advocate spending government money in the middle of a recession. Every government had done that going back to the days of the Irish potato famine. What he gave to us was a way of thinking about the magnitude and the dimensions and so forth.
Paul Samuelson
What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don't know very much.
I did not throw out my education lightly, but what I was being taught was of no use in explaining what I saw around me. It was the Great Depression.
People have the wrong idea that God will forgive Reagan. They say he didn't know what he was doing. It's true he didn't know a lot of what was going on, but he was directly responsible.
My belief is that nothing that can be expressed by mathematics cannot be expressed by careful use of literary words.
It is not easy to get rich in Las Vegas, at Churchill Downs, or at the local Merrill Lynch office.
Economics is a choice between alternatives all the time. Those are the trade-offs.
Every good cause is worth some inefficiency.
Milton Friedman. Friedman had a solid MV = PQ doctrine from which he deviated very little all his life. By the way, he's about as smart a guy as you'll meet. He's as persuasive as you hope not to meet.
Avoiding inflation is not an absolute imperative but rather is one of a number of conflicting goals that we must pursue and that we may often have to compromise.
You're not making a decision if you come to a fork in the road. There is no 'it' to take. It's one or the other.
I believe, in the stock market - that's one of my fields - that most people are irrational. And to be irrational, you can be irrational in so many different ways that, practically, the result is indeterminate.
Investing should be dull. It shouldn't be exciting.
Let me acknowledge that I realize that, in honoring me, the Committee of the Royal Academy of Sciences is in fact saying a good word for all of those of my generation who have been laboring in the same vineyard.
We've become a debtor nation. I don't mean just on fixed-loan terms, but we own increasingly less abroad than is owned from abroad here.
Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.
A temporary reduction in tax rates on individual incomes can be a powerful weapon against recession.
It is indeed true that the stock market can forecast the business cycle.
Let those who will - write the nation's laws - if I can write its textbooks.
Globalization presumes sustained economic growth. Otherwise, the process loses its economic benefits and political support.
Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.
Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear - and what they want to hear is what won't happen.
Today we see how utterly mistaken was the Milton Friedman notion that a market system can regulate itself... Everyone understands now, on the contrary, that there can be no solution without government.
The parts of physics that are exact are the parts of physics that are exact. The parts that are inexact are vastly greater. Sensible scientists don't waste their time pushing against doors that endlessly will not give. They are opportunistic and go where they can, but there are pitfalls in that.
Women are men without money.
Actually, in my advanced, high-falutin' frontier economics, I often work with what I define as 'money metric utility', and I ask people, 'Do you really want that? What are you willing to pay for that?'
Companies are not charitable enterprises: They hire workers to make profits. In the United States, this logic still works. In Europe, it hardly does.
The Keynesian idea is once again accepted that fiscal policy and deficit spending has a major role to play in guiding a market economy. I wish Friedman were still alive so he could witness how his extremism led to the defeat of his own ideas.
The history of the twentieth century - America's century! - has been pretty much a history of rising prices.
The remarkable fact is not how much government does to control economic activity, but how much it does not do.
American society was economically ill-run in the 1980s. Our society has been on a consumption binge. If the American people had a town meeting and said, 'What do we care about posterity? Posterity hasn't done anything for us; we're going to whoop it up now', that is a rational judgment. But nobody ever did that.
Charles Darwin got his theory, his notion of natural selection, evolution, and so did its independent discoverer, Alfred Wallace, from reading Malthus.
What I say is, 'If you're so rich, how come you're so dumb?'
I think economics - and this is what I've tried to impart - has a tremendous amount of human interest in it.
An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed.
Things swept so badly that I had distrust - after 1967, let's say - of American Keynesianism. For better or worse, U.S. Keynesianism was so far ahead of where it started. I am a cafeteria Keynesian.
The very name of my subject, economics, suggests economizing or maximizing. But Political Economy has gone a long way beyond home economics.
To a person of analytical ability, perceptive enough to realise that mathematical equipment was a powerful sword in economics, the world of economics was his or her oyster in 1935. The terrain was strewn with beautiful theorems begging to be picked up and arranged in unified order.
Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.
I came to the University of Chicago on the morning of January 2, 1932. I wasn't yet a graduate of high school for another few months. And that was about the low point of the Herbert Hoover/Andrew Mellon phase after October of 1929. That's quite a number of years to have inaction.
The dream of any scholar has, for me, come true by virtue of this award. The Nobel Prizes are justly famous in the hard sciences, in literature, and for peace.
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.
Time is our ultimate scarcity. Isaac Newton can give us more electricity, but he can't give us more than 24 hours of the day of time. And so we're constantly having to sacrifice alternate activities to get the one that pleases us most.
The contrafactual history is what it would have been the other way. Think of the Kennedy triumph in the missiles crisis. Worked out fine. Khrushchev blinked and so forth. The other road, you don't want to think too hard about. You could have had nuclear missiles wiping out a tenth of the globe.
I think that it's more important for an economist to be wise and sophisticated in scientific method than it is for a physicist because with controlled laboratory experiments possible, they practically guide you; you couldn't go astray. Whereas in economics, by dogma and misunderstanding, you can go very sadly astray.
U.S. capital formation, which has been pretty high in the '90s and very high in the late 1990s, is what is being financed by the savings of the rest of the world, generally poorer than ourselves, because our deficit on current account, chronic deficit, is their surplus, and they have been willingly bringing that to the American market.
I can tell you, because I serve on so many nonprofit boards - where half of us are academics and half of us are from Wall Street - that there's no CEO who understands at all a derivative. All they know is that somebody tells them in their organization, 'We've got a wonderful profit center.'
It is dead wrong about necessary surplus of winnings over losings.
Often, when I became a consultant to a federal agency, that precipitated its demise.
When I was a kid, I reckoned things in Hershey bars. Is this worth three Hershey bars to me?
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