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?'
Interpretation
The quote highlights the idea of valuing things based on their price and personal utility.
In this quote, Paul Samuelson emphasizes the importance of understanding the relationship between desire and cost in economics. He suggests that individuals should consider their true wants and the sacrifices they are willing to make, expressed in monetary terms, to obtain what they desire. This concept underscores the significance of personal valuation and decision-making in economic behavior.
In practice
In a discussion about budgeting for a project, I might say, 'As Paul Samuelson once noted, do you really want that? What are you willing to pay for that?'
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.
I can't think of a president who has been overburdened by a knowledge of economics.
My belief is that nothing that can be expressed by mathematics cannot be expressed by careful use of literary words.
Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear - and what they want to hear is what won't happen.
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.
Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.
Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over.
It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know.
War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods.
If Europe today accounts for just over 7 per cent of the world's population, produces around 25 per cent of global GDP and has to finance 50 per cent of global social spending, then it's obvious that it will have to work very hard to maintain its prosperity and way of life.
Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the 'hidden' confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.
The gold standard did not collapse. Governments abolished it in order to pave the way for inflation. The whole grim apparatus of oppression and coercion, policemen, customs guards, penal courts, prisons, in some countries even executioners, had to be put into action in order to destroy the gold standard.
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