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.

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.

Anyone with special abilities earns a differential return on that flair, which we economists call a rent. Those few with extraordinary P.Q. (Performance Quotient) will not give away such rent to the Ford Foundation or the local bank trust department. They have too high an I.Q. for that.

To prove that Wall Street is an early omen of movements still to come in GNP, commentators quote economic studies alleging that market downturns predicted four out of the last five recessions. That is an understatement. Wall Street indexes predicted nine out of the last five recessions! And its mistakes were beauties.

The sad truth is that it is precisely those who disagree most with the hypothesis of efficient market pricing of stocks, those who pooh-pooh beta analysis and all that, who are least able to understand the analysis needed to test that hypothesis.

The growth of a nation's productive potential is the central factor in determining its growth in real wages and living standards.... high rates of investment and saving usually have a big payoff in promoting economic growth.

Macroeconomics, even with all of our computers and with all of our information - is not an exact science and is incapable of being an exact science.