Paul Samuelson Quotes
I think that it's more important for an economist to be wise and sophisticated in scientific method than it is for a physicist because with controlled laboratory experiments possible, they practically guide you; you couldn't go astray. Whereas in economics, by dogma and misunderstanding, you can go very sadly astray.
Samuelson, Paul A. Interview by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw. Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, PBS, 2002.
This quotation polarized the economists into those who thought that economics was held back by the rigidity of the scientific method and those who thought that economics was a backward science because it did not follow the standards of the more developed scientists. Scientists from other fields are almost universally in agreement and accuse many economists of making predictions and pronouncements from analyses that in other sciences would only be called guesses. The same is said of politics by many scientists.
Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009) was an American economist who was the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. When awarding the prize in 1970, the Swedish Royal Academies stated that he "has done more than any other contemporary economist to raise the level of scientific analysis in economic theory". Economic historian Randall E. Parker has called him the "Father of Modern Economics", and The New York Times considers him to be the "foremost academic economist of the 20th century".
