I don't care who writes a nation's laws - or crafts its advanced treaties - if I can write its economics textbooks.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of economic education in shaping a society's values and decisions, more than political laws or treaties.
In this quote, Paul Samuelson highlights the profound impact of education, particularly in economics, on a nation's structure and future. He suggests that the way people understand and engage with economic concepts can influence their actions and beliefs more than the laws and treaties that govern them. By stating that he doesn't care about who writes laws, he implies that knowledge and education in economics are foundational to everything else in society.
In practice
In a speech addressing a community college graduation, one could use this quote to stress the importance of education in shaping future leaders.
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.
My family was well off but not rich. I spent the four years I was an undergraduate working on the beach. And it wasn't because I was lazy; it was because my freshman class would go to a hundred different employers and wouldn't get a nibble. That was a disequilibrium system. I realized that the ordinary old-fashioned Euclidean geometry didn't apply.
Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.
Clutter is the disease of American writing.
... bums on the outside, libraries inside.
Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail.
An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
As more people become more intelligent they care less for preachers and more for teachers.
Theory is taught so as to make the student believe that he or she can become a Marxist, a feminist, an Afrocentrist, or a deconstructionist with about the same effort and commitment required in choosing items from a menu.
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