Economics is not an exact science. It's a combination of an art and elements of science. And that's almost the first and last lesson to be learned about economics: that in my judgment, we are not converging toward exactitude, but we're improving our data bases and our ways of reasoning about them.
Interpretation
Economics blends art and science, emphasizing the evolving nature of understanding economic data.
Paul Samuelson highlights that economics is not a precise discipline, but rather an intersection of artistic interpretation and scientific analysis. He emphasizes that instead of seeking perfect accuracy, economists should focus on improving their data and reasoning methods, acknowledging the complexity and dynamism inherent to the field.
In practice
In a lecture on the fluidity of economic models, one might quote Samuelson to illustrate the complexity of economic understanding.
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.
The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.
At lunch Francis [Crick] winged into the Eagle to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life.
No astrophysicist would deny the possibility of life. I think we're not creative enough to imagine what life would be like on another planet. Show me a dead alien. Better yet, show me a live one!
Each of these [bacterial] species are masterpieces of evolution. Each has persisted for thousands to millions of years. Each is exquisitely adapted to the environment in which it lives, interlocked with other species to form ecosystems upon which our own lives depend in ways we have not begun even to imagine.
If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible.
Physics is very muddled again at the moment; it is much too hard for me anyway, and I wish I were a movie comedian or something like that and had never heard anything about physics!
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