Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that economics lacks the empirical rigor of a true science and has deteriorated over time.
Paul Samuelson's quote reflects a critical perspective on the field of economics, emphasizing that it does not adhere to the scientific method as strictly as other disciplines. By stating that economics has become less of a science over the years, he implies a growing detachment from objective analysis and that the discipline may be influenced by subjective interests and ideologies.
In practice
In a debate about economic policy, this quote can be used to argue the inadequacies of current economic theories.
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.
There's nothing in Keynesian economics that would allow you to solve stagflation. But there's nothing in neoclassical economics that would allow you to solve stagflation, either.
It may be that our cosmic curiosity... is a genetically-encoded force that we illuminate when we look up and wonder.
If you don't get a good night's sleep, the events of the day are not properly encoded in memory.
Dr. Kertesz mentioned to me a case known to him of a farmer who had developed prosopagnosia and in consequence could no longer distinguish (the faces of) his cows, and of another such patient, an attendant in a Natural History Museum, who mistook his own reflection for the diorama of an ape
I profess to learn and to teach anatomy not from books but from dissections, not from the tenets of Philosophers but from the fabric of Nature.
Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.
Now that we can read and write the genetic code, put it in digital form and translate it back into synthesized life, it will be possible to speed up biological evolution to the pace of social evolution.
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