Economics is a choice between alternatives all the time. Those are the trade-offs.
— Paul Samuelson
My family was well off but not rich. I spent the four years I was an undergraduate working on the beach. And it wasn't because I was lazy; it was because my freshman class would go to a hundred different employers and wouldn't get a nibble. That was a disequilibrium system. I realized that the ordinary old-fashioned Euclidean geometry didn't apply.
It is not easy to get rich in Las Vegas, at Churchill Downs, or at the local Merrill Lynch office.
Asia's governments come in two broad varieties: young, fragile democracies - and older, fragile authoritarian regimes.
Self-deception ultimately explains Japan's plight. The Japanese have never accepted that change is in their interest - and not merely a response to U.S. criticism.
What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don't know very much.
The 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.
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.
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.
Funeral by funeral, theory advances.
Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear - and what they want to hear is what won't happen.
Companies are not charitable enterprises: They hire workers to make profits. In the United States, this logic still works. In Europe, it hardly does.
An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed.
Good questions outrank easy answers.
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.
Every good cause is worth some inefficiency.
Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.
Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.
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.
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.
