When I once called myself a “Sunday painter” dabbling in stochastic finance, that was not meant to belittle finance theory as a branch of serious eco… - Paul Samuelson

I had a great admiration for Pigou. I thought that, in many ways, he was not only a faithful follower of Alfred Marshall, but he was also a more fertile developer of the Marshallian tradition than Marshall himself. … Whitehead said to me:“Don’t you think that Pigou was an overrated economist? Wasn’t Foxwell a better man?” Since I am an honest man, I said to Whitehead:“No, I think Pigou was a much more important economist than Foxwell.”

To the student of economic history the preponderant truth is that technical change has since 1750 tended to raise market clearing real wage rates. This property of the Age After Newton is hard to understand and explicate if you believe that sterile congealed-dead-labor is embodied in machines almost infinitely substitutable for live labor; equally confusing to you will be the truth that inventions which are labor saving may at the same time be wage raising! The doctrines of equated rates of surplus value moved Marxians backward from square one in the understanding of the laws of motion of the capitalistic system or the system of the Mixed Economy.

I tell no secret when I repeat that fame and reputation are much a matter of luck and chance.