Actually, in my advanced, high-falutin' frontier economics, I often work with what I define as 'money metric utility,' and I ask people, 'Do you really want that? What are you willing to pay for that?'
Interpretation
The quote highlights the idea of valuing things based on their price and personal utility.
In this quote, Paul Samuelson emphasizes the importance of understanding the relationship between desire and cost in economics. He suggests that individuals should consider their true wants and the sacrifices they are willing to make, expressed in monetary terms, to obtain what they desire. This concept underscores the significance of personal valuation and decision-making in economic behavior.
In practice
In a discussion about budgeting for a project, I might say, 'As Paul Samuelson once noted, do you really want that? What are you willing to pay for that?'
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.
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The law of property determines who owns something, but the market determines how it will be used.
Our economy is the result of millions of decisions we all make every day about producing, earning, saving, investing, and spending.
Regulating and taxing marijuana would simultaneously save taxpayers billions of dollars in enforcement and incarceration costs, while providing many billions of dollars in revenue annually.
If developed countries' citizens want to feel slightly better about their economies' slow growth and high unemployment, they should contemplate how much worse matters could be without the institutions that they have.
I will not let anyone tell me we must spend more money. This crisis did not come about because we issued too little money but because we created economic growth with too much money and it was not sustainable growth.
We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics. Out of the collapse of a prosperity whose builders boasted their practicality has come the conviction that in the long run economic morality pays.
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