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"Science is not art. Yet, despite the lack of complete identity between art and science, there is much in common among different creative processes."
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Paul SamuelsonIn the preface to the reissue of Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, Frank Kn — Paul Samuelson
"In the preface to the reissue of Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, Frank Knight makes the penetrating observation that under the conditions envisaged above the velocity of circulation would become infinite and so would the price level. This is perhaps an over-dramatic way of saying that nobody would hold money, and it would become a free good to go into the category of shell and other things which once served as money. We should expect too that it would not only pass out of circulation, but it would cease to be used as a conventional numeraire in terms of which prices are expressed. Interest bearing money would emerge. Of course, the above does not happen in real life, precisely because uncertainty, contingency needs, non-synchronization of revenues and outlay, transaction frictions, etc., etc., all are with us. But the abstract special case analyzed above should warn us against the facile assumption that the average levels of the structure of interest rates are determined solely or primarily by these differential factors. At times they are primary, and at other times, such as the twenties in this country, they may not be. As a generalization I should hazard the hypothesis that they are likely to be of great importance in an economy in which there is a “quasi-zero" rate of interest. I think by this hypothesis one can explain many of the anomalies of the United States money market in the thirties."
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Paul Samuelson
Paul Samuelson
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Paul Anthony Samuelson was an American economist who was the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. When awarding the prize in 1970, the Swedish Royal Academies stated that he "has done more than any other contemporary economist to raise the level of scientific analysis in economic theory".
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"Paul Samuelson is omnipresent in American and even world economics; like Joyces Humphrey Chimpeden Earwicker or Melvilles Confidence Man,. he appears at every turn of history and in every disguise."
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Paul SamuelsonQuote
"Needless to say, the partial equilibrium assumptions involved in the domestic demand schedules and the neglect of aggregative relations constitute a serious defect of such a model except as a rough first approximation to the answers in especially favorable cases. Good economic theory will recognize these limitations rather than be predisposed to neglect them."
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Paul SamuelsonQuote
"I think the acceptance of "mathematical expectation of utility" or its "arithmetic mean" was an unthinking carryover from the mathematical theory of the law of large numbers as applied to asymptotic processes."
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Paul SamuelsonQuote
"Perhaps all we can expect of a public body, charged with grave responsibilities, is that it should in its public utterances make out cases stronger than it really believes in. Or perhaps, because its opposition deals in overly strong criticisms, it may for political reasons and for understandable psychological reasons provide overly strong rebuttals. Or perhaps it is the case that the authorities believe that there are no sensible reasons to doubt the following view: The way to maximize growth, to maximize the long-run degree of achieved employment, to maximize equity among the various social groups that could be affected by price level changes is, in the absence of important cost pressures and even more in their presence, for the Federal Reserve to insist upon the attainment of essentially stable long-run price levels."
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Paul SamuelsonQuote
"The goals, methods, and strategies of what borders on science is different from the gyration of fashion and the incommensurability of arts and music in different epochs. Because this different process of cumulative science is imperfect, historians and philosophers of science intermittently downplay this difference."
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Paul Samuelson