It isn't that greed's increased. What's increased is the realization that you've got a free field to reach out for what you'd like to do.
Paul SamuelsonThe debate can be put in the form of the question: Resolved, that the best of money managers cannot be demonstrated to be able to deliver the goods of superior portfolio-selection performance. Any jury that reviews the evidence, and there is a great deal of relevant evidence, must at least come out with the Scottish verdict: Superior investment performance is unproved.
Paul SamuelsonMea culpa, mea culpa. MIT and Wharton and University of Chicago created the financial engineering instruments, which, like Samson and Delilah, blinded every CEO. They didn't realize the kind of leverage they were doing and they didn't understand when they were really creating a real profit or a fictitious one.
Paul SamuelsonThe 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.
Paul SamuelsonThis message (that attempting to beat the market is futile) can never be sold on Wall Street because it is in effect telling stock analysts to drop dead.
Paul SamuelsonPerhaps there really are managers who can outperform the market consistently - logic would suggest that they exist. But they are remarkably well-hidden.
Paul SamuelsonBy keeping labor supply down, immigration policy tends to keep wages high. Let us underline this basic principle: Limitation of the supply of any grade of labor relative to all other productive factors can be expected to raise its wage rate; and increase in supply will, other things being equal, tend to depress wage rates.
Paul SamuelsonWhat counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth...The Soviet model has surely demonstrated that a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth.
Paul SamuelsonSuppose it was demonstrated that one out of twenty alcoholics could learn to become a moderate social drinker. The experienced clinician would answer, 'Even if true, act as if it were false, for you will never identify that one in twenty, and in the attempt five in twenty will be ruined.' Investors should forsake the search for such tiny needles in huge haystacks.
Paul SamuelsonFirst, those who disagree with market efficiency simply assert that it stands to common sense that greater effort to get facts and greater acumen in analyzing those facts will pay off in better performance somehow measured. (By this logic, cure for cancer must have been found by 1955).
Paul SamuelsonForsake search for needles that are so very small in haystacks that are so very large.
Paul SamuelsonThe problem is no longer that with every pair of hands that comes into the world there comes a hungry stomach. Rather it is that, attached to those hands are sharp elbows.
Paul SamuelsonThe failure of market catallactics in no way denies the following truth: given sufficient knowledge the optimal decisions can always be found by scanning over all the attainable states of the world and selecting the one which according to the postulated ethical welfare function is best. The solution 'exists'; the problem is how to 'find' it.
Paul SamuelsonProfits are the lifeblood of the economic system, the magic elixir upon which progress and all good things depend ultimately. But one man's lifeblood is another man's cancer.
Paul SamuelsonOur ideal society finds it essential to put a rent on land as a way of maximizing the total consumption available to the society. ...Pure land rent is in the nature of a 'surplus' which can be taxed heavily without distorting production incentives or efficiency. A land value tax can be called 'the useful tax on measured land surplus'.
Paul Samuelson