My notion of a fruitful economic science would be that it can help us explain and understand the course of actual economic history. A scholar who ser… - Paul Samuelson

Mathematics is the handmaiden of the sciences. But mathematics also has a life of her own, gaining as much in her own development and fulfillment from the sciences as she gives to them. To help describe how apples and planets fall, and how ropes hang, Newton and Leibniz developed the calculus. By serendipity, that mode of analysis permitted economists to perfect the theory of general equilibrium two centuries later.

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 economic theory. Such a peculiar view was expressed again and again by the late Milton Friedman, a dizzy view that I still find incomprehensible.

You must realize how bad, temporarily, capitalism had become in public opinion. I remember seeing a poll of small town attitudes in local newspapers. They asked questions like "should we nationalize the banking system?" More than half of those editors, about the most conservative group in the world, were in favor of nationalizing the banking system. Father Coughlin, the Detroit demagogue who turned anti-Semitic, complained about "fountain pen money, the perpetrator of great wealth, the money changers in the temple." It was kind of a crude expansionism. Huey Long and "every man a millionaire," or whatever it was. So I would say that Keynes thought of himself as saving the system. And lots of the New Dealers ― original New Dealers, Veblenites, technocrats ― did not like Keynesian economics. They said "that is using palliatives, it's not getting rid of the wicked capitalistic ethos." Keynes told Roosevelt when he came here in 1933 that he needed to spend so much more per month in deficit spending. He gave very precise figures with great self-confidence.