The General Theory caught most economists under the age of 35 with the unexpected virulence of a disease first attacking and decimating an isolated t… - Paul Samuelson

From the beginning I could not believe that the “efficient market” hypothesis was dependent on a pure Brownian motion white noise or any truly random random walk. Place a minuscule colloidal molecule on a horizontal table that covers unlimited acres. Bombard it from every direction with thousands of minute atoms; and then if you wait long enough that original molecule can have traveled a billion miles in one direction. That’s truly a random Bachelier-Einstein walk, but not my notion of economic fluctuations.

I think the acceptance of "mathematical expectation of utility" or its "arithmetic mean" was an unthinking carryover from the mathematical theory of the law of large numbers as applied to asymptotic processes.

For better or worse, the picture album whose pages I have been turning is that of the main stream of international economics. Many of its advances lie in what the historian of science Thomas Kuhn would call 'normal' rather than 'revolutionary' science. It is hard to imagine having had too good an education and too good a research environment. And yet as we grapple with the ever-changing problems of the modern world that are arising in the deliberations of this World Congress, we know we must put aside the pictures and souvenirs of the past, and we must turn a youthful eye out to meet the emerging universe.