Jul 25, 2025

Paul Samuelson: You want excitement?

Paul Samuelson was no fan of fun.

Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.
– Paul Samuelson

It's Friday, so today's story is one from the My Daily Oracle archives.

Paul Samuelson is considered a revolutionary economist. He wrote the best-selling economics textbook of all time and was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. When he got the call from the Nobel Prize committee at 5:30 AM one morning, his wife was in bed next to him.

She asked, "Which of our kids has been in an accident?"

Samuelson also helped found one of the earliest and most influential hedge funds in 1970, Commodities Corp. That same year, he made a substantial and profitable investment in Berkshire Hathaway.

Even though Samuelson's focus was on economic theory rather than getting rich, he has lessons for investors. He shows us that not all academic theories are useless in real life. He also teaches that bringing mathematical rigor to your analysis helps you make better investment decisions.

The only proper biography of Paul Samuelson is Founder of Modern Economics: Paul A. Samuelson by Roger E. Backhouse. Reviewers called it a "surprisingly riveting read" and "nothing less than an intellectual history of the making of modern economics."

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