The pre-1800 pattern of commercial panics had to be a case of NON MACRO-EFFICIENCY of markets. We’ve come a long way, baby, in two hundred years towa… - Paul Samuelson

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The pre-1800 pattern of commercial panics had to be a case of NON MACRO-EFFICIENCY of markets. We’ve come a long way, baby, in two hundred years toward micro efficiency of markets: Black-Scholes option pricing, indexing of portfolio diversification, and so forth. But there is no persuasive evidence, either from economic history or avant garde theorizing, that MACRO MARKET INEFFICIENCY is trending toward extinction: The future can well witness the oldest business cycle mechanism, the South Sea Bubble, and that kind of thing. We have no theory of the putative duration of a bubble. It can always go as long again as it has already gone. You cannot make money on correcting macro inefficiencies in the price level of the stock market.

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About Paul Samuelson

Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009) was an American economist. He was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Also Known As

Native Name: Paul Anthony Samuelson
Alternative Names: Paul A. Samuelson
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Additional quotes by Paul Samuelson

Yes, Keynes was a genius. Yes, some of his ideas were inchoate and would not have lent themselves usefully to diagramming and symbolic manipulation. Yes, by the time of the Radcliffe committee many of his British admirers were still frozen in the Model T version of his system. And yes, Keynes resented excessive simplifying of his paradigms.
Nevertheless, in science it is not the incoherent, inchoate and ineffable that has a cash value. If that were so, Goethe would be a greater scientist than either Einstein or Newton. What matters is the Kuhnian paradigm that people who are not geniuses can use. That which so many scholars independently agreed upon cannot be independent of the text that Keynes wrote down for them to read. What is remarkable is not the cogency of the case that Leijonhufvud manages to muster, which is rather flimsy, but rather how strong was the latent demand in the 1970s for a work to debunk Keynesianism. Harry Johnson put the same point in a different way.

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