Tape 144 - Lessons from recent economic history
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| - | Welcome once again as MIT Professor Paul Samuelson | 0:02 |
| discusses the current economic scene. | 0:04 | |
| This series is produced by | 0:07 | |
| Instructional Dynamics Incorporated. | 0:08 | |
| This program was recorded January 7th. | 0:10 | |
| - | We begin a new year, 1974. | 0:13 |
| The new year is traditionally a time for stock taking | 0:16 | |
| and so I'd like today to try to look at | 0:20 | |
| what lessons it is that we have been learning | 0:24 | |
| or that are there to be learned | 0:28 | |
| from recent economic experience. | 0:30 | |
| My thoughts are on this subject | 0:35 | |
| because between Christmas Day and New Year's, | 0:37 | |
| the American Economic Association has its annual meetings. | 0:42 | |
| This year those meetings were in New York City | 0:46 | |
| at the Hilton Hotel. | 0:49 | |
| As usual, a tremendous number of social scientists, | 0:53 | |
| statisticians and economists come together, | 0:57 | |
| more than 10,000 I believe this year. | 1:00 | |
| And they give papers to each other, | 1:03 | |
| the audiences are large and I had to appear on a panel | 1:06 | |
| with some very distinguished fellow economists | 1:11 | |
| to glean the lessons from the current economic expansion. | 1:16 | |
| Well, let me take the fist ten minutes | 1:22 | |
| to discuss ten lessons | 1:25 | |
| that I think there are to be learned from recent experience, | 1:29 | |
| that's a rate of about one lesson a minute. | 1:33 | |
| Well lesson number one. | 1:38 | |
| Economists cannot forecast the future with precision. | 1:40 | |
| Lesson number two. | 1:45 | |
| Neither can anyone else. | 1:47 | |
| And the forecast made by economists, | 1:50 | |
| are systematically better than any made by astrologers, | 1:53 | |
| cranks, brokers, bankers, businessmen, revolutionists, | 1:57 | |
| and apologists, engineers and computers. | 2:02 | |
| This I believe to be a finding of experience. | 2:06 | |
| I don't know whether or not priori grounds | 2:11 | |
| this would be very likely, | 2:14 | |
| but when one actually keeps the almanac | 2:15 | |
| and puts into the record | 2:20 | |
| the errors of forecasting made by different groups, | 2:23 | |
| we have a way over a long period of time of | 2:28 | |
| comparing the relative | 2:32 | |
| batting averages of different groups. | 2:34 | |
| So together these first two lessons, | 2:39 | |
| might constitute the random dart theory | 2:41 | |
| of getting a forecast. | 2:45 | |
| Throw a coin at any one of the couple of dozen | 2:48 | |
| leading practitioners of the forecasting art | 2:51 | |
| Wharton School, University of Michigan, | 2:55 | |
| Chase Econometrics, DRI, | 2:57 | |
| Townsend Greenspan, so forth, | 3:01 | |
| and you'll do about as well, | 3:04 | |
| as if you tried to pick out the very best one. | 3:06 | |
| In fact it won't matter much where your coin lands | 3:09 | |
| you'll get almost the same forecast anyway, | 3:12 | |
| which leads to the next lesson. | 3:16 | |
| Lesson number three. | 3:18 | |
| Economists can succeed in forecasting like each other. | 3:21 | |
| Professor Roy Blough of the | 3:26 | |
| Columbia Graduate School of Business, | 3:29 | |
| stated this when he was at the Treasury | 3:33 | |
| in the form of a dogma, and Blough's dogma still holds. | 3:35 | |
| Economists are like eight Eskimos in one bed. | 3:40 | |
| The only thing you can be sure about, | 3:43 | |
| is that they're all going to turn over together. | 3:45 | |
| I may add as a corollary to Blough's law, | 3:49 | |
| most economists are going to be all correct together | 3:52 | |
| or all wrong together. | 3:56 | |
| The dispersion between forecasts by a score of university, | 3:58 | |
| bank, governments, and corporation analysts, | 4:03 | |
| is much less than the dispersion of their best guesses | 4:07 | |
| around where the future reality will in fact lie. | 4:11 | |
| This is no more surprising than that the space | 4:16 | |
| between a man's ears has no relation | 4:19 | |
| to his standard error of inference. | 4:22 | |
| Lesson number four. | 4:26 | |
| Some economists manage to forecast worse than others, | 4:28 | |
| but a Darwinian process of selection | 4:32 | |
| often self selection, when one deals with rational men, | 4:35 | |
| with alternative uses for their leisure time, | 4:39 | |
| does serve to eliminate those whose comparative advantage | 4:43 | |
| lies in cosmology or in futurism. | 4:47 | |
| If you can't forecast a business situation, | 4:51 | |
| become a futurist. | 4:54 | |
| After man has said a dozen times, | 4:56 | |
| if this next forecast doesn't turn out to be correct, | 4:59 | |
| I'll hang up my gloves, he finally does. | 5:02 | |
| Or he may learn that the finance company | 5:06 | |
| wants to repossess them. | 5:09 | |
| However there are exceptions to this rule. | 5:11 | |
| Some masochists do make a nice living | 5:13 | |
| out of being wrong in an interesting way. | 5:16 | |
| They'll predict in every other year | 5:20 | |
| that the Dow Jones Averages will go down to 200, | 5:21 | |
| where they'll meet the Dollar price of gold. | 5:24 | |
| Businessmen who like to have their adrenaline run | 5:28 | |
| listening to a ghost story, will often pay just as much | 5:30 | |
| to listen to these ever losers as to informed analysts. | 5:34 | |
| But my Darwinian proposition becomes irrefutable | 5:38 | |
| when I base it on the tautology | 5:43 | |
| that the born losers who stay in the forecasting game | 5:45 | |
| soon cease to be regarded as economists | 5:49 | |
| by members of our guild. | 5:51 | |
| Lesson five. | 5:54 | |
| An automatic computer can forecast better | 5:55 | |
| than an official government agency. | 5:58 | |
| I'll add particularly, if the people | 6:01 | |
| in that government agency really aren't trying | 6:04 | |
| to give their best scientific forecast, | 6:06 | |
| but are being guided, as sometimes happens | 6:08 | |
| in any administration, by political motives. | 6:11 | |
| But an analyst with judgment can still do better | 6:16 | |
| than an automatic computer. | 6:19 | |
| This is born out, not only by the rather sad performance | 6:21 | |
| in recent years of the reduced form Monitorist Model | 6:25 | |
| of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, | 6:28 | |
| which I gather from recent publication, | 6:31 | |
| does seem about to hang up its gloves | 6:35 | |
| as far as published regular forecasts are concerned. | 6:37 | |
| But it is also born out by Ray Fair, | 6:43 | |
| Professor Fair's audit of his own Princeton model, | 6:46 | |
| which tries to do without any inputs of judgment. | 6:50 | |
| And which thereby runs up, it turns out from experience, | 6:53 | |
| a larger means squared error | 6:57 | |
| than the leading judgmental computer models | 6:59 | |
| of the Wharton, Michigan, VRI, Chase or other type. | 7:03 | |
| Lesson six. | 7:08 | |
| Judgmental analysts cannot do without the computer. | 7:11 | |
| So much of the information that comes to any man of judgment | 7:16 | |
| these days, has been massaged by a computer, | 7:20 | |
| handled through it, produced by it, | 7:24 | |
| you might even say fabricated by it, | 7:26 | |
| that the era has passed when one could have a fair contest | 7:29 | |
| between a non analytical observer such as Sumner Slichter | 7:33 | |
| and a giant post-Kantian macro computer model. | 7:37 | |
| Were Slichter alive today, | 7:41 | |
| he would be riding on the escalator of the computer, | 7:43 | |
| at the same time that he would be making | 7:46 | |
| his own forward and upward strides | 7:48 | |
| out of his own native shrewdness. | 7:51 | |
| I picked Sumner Slichter because for many years | 7:53 | |
| he was an excellent forecaster. | 7:57 | |
| You may ask how do I know that Sumner Slichter | 8:00 | |
| was an excellent forecaster. | 8:02 | |
| I know it the way I know most things. | 8:05 | |
| I had a graduate student who wrote a thesis | 8:08 | |
| on the craft and art and science of forecasting. | 8:12 | |
| This is Professor Robert Adams, | 8:16 | |
| now of the Michigan Graduate Business School, | 8:18 | |
| but then Head of the Economics Department at Exxon, | 8:22 | |
| or as it was called then, Standard Oil of New Jersey. | 8:27 | |
| And he made a study of all different forecasting methods, | 8:30 | |
| and one of his chapters was devoted | 8:34 | |
| to being Sumner Slichter. | 8:36 | |
| And what he did was to read | 8:38 | |
| everything he could get his hands on by Sumner Slichter | 8:42 | |
| which had a bearing on the future developments of business. | 8:46 | |
| And he tried to decide whether Sumner Slichter | 8:51 | |
| was saying something about the future. | 8:53 | |
| Very often, Slichter was not, often he was saying | 8:56 | |
| it was going to rain tomorrow unless the sun is shining. | 8:59 | |
| But sometimes, it was clear that Sumner Slichter | 9:02 | |
| was saying something definite about the future. | 9:05 | |
| Sometimes it appeared that he might be saying something | 9:08 | |
| about the future, but it wasn't definitely clear, | 9:10 | |
| and in that case, Doctor Adams had a panel | 9:13 | |
| of two or three fellow graduate students | 9:18 | |
| read the passage in question and if they agreed | 9:22 | |
| on what it was that was being said | 9:25 | |
| then he entered it in the record. | 9:27 | |
| And then, having derived what Sumner Slichter | 9:29 | |
| said about the future, Adams went back to see | 9:33 | |
| what actually happened in the future, | 9:36 | |
| and his findings were quite favorable | 9:39 | |
| towards Sumner Slichter, in the prime of his life, | 9:43 | |
| as a forecaster. | 9:46 | |
| But as the point was made here in lesson six, | 9:49 | |
| you can no longer have a Sumner Slichter whose judgment | 9:52 | |
| was uncontaminated by the output of the prolific computer. | 9:57 | |
| Any consumer of business information is already | 10:03 | |
| infected by data that comes from the computer, | 10:07 | |
| so it can't be the computer versus man, | 10:11 | |
| it has to be man with the computer doing one thing, | 10:13 | |
| or doing another. | 10:16 | |
| Lesson number seven. | 10:18 | |
| Economists can forecast everything. | 10:20 | |
| Well, almost forecast everything, but prices. | 10:24 | |
| In this sense, we are the reverse of Oscar Wilde's cynics, | 10:30 | |
| who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. | 10:35 | |
| When it comes to next March's price of wheat, | 10:38 | |
| when you come to think about it though, | 10:42 | |
| why should any PhD, be able to forecast that better | 10:44 | |
| than people who know a great deal | 10:48 | |
| about the crops and milling industry | 10:50 | |
| and who have a lot of money riding | 10:51 | |
| on the outcome of their best guesses. | 10:53 | |
| All the things that are easy to forecast, that is, | 10:56 | |
| easy enough for a mere Professor to foresee, | 10:59 | |
| those things can be expected to have already | 11:02 | |
| been taken account of by the speculative market. | 11:05 | |
| Indeed, if there were in Las Vegas, or in New York, | 11:09 | |
| a continuous casino, on the money GMP of let's say | 11:14 | |
| 1974's fourth quarter, | 11:19 | |
| it would be absurd to think that the best | 11:22 | |
| economic forecasters could improve, | 11:24 | |
| or improve much, upon the guess posted there. | 11:27 | |
| Just imagine that every day, all day long, | 11:32 | |
| there is a quoted number for what the GNP will be, | 11:36 | |
| and you have as many people who'd like to be on one side | 11:41 | |
| as on the other side, the bulls and the bears. | 11:44 | |
| It's adjusted as they get new information. | 11:47 | |
| Whatever knowledge and analytical skill | 11:52 | |
| the best money GNP forecasters posses, | 11:54 | |
| would already presumably have been fed into the bidding, | 12:00 | |
| and of course, it's a manifest contradiction | 12:04 | |
| to think that most economists can be expected | 12:07 | |
| to do better than their own best performance. | 12:10 | |
| But I'm saying something more devastating, | 12:14 | |
| than that economist can't forecast particular prices, | 12:17 | |
| or forecast better than themselves. | 12:22 | |
| What I'm saying is, that the best forecasters | 12:27 | |
| have been rather poor in predicting | 12:31 | |
| the general price level's movements | 12:33 | |
| and level, even a year ahead. | 12:36 | |
| Let's go back to the year 1973. | 12:40 | |
| By Valentine's Day, 1973, | 12:43 | |
| the best forecasters, those with the best batting average, | 12:46 | |
| were beginning to call for the growth recession | 12:50 | |
| that we now know did set it at the end of the first quarter. | 12:53 | |
| So, if we correct their end of 1972, | 12:59 | |
| overly optimistic forecasts, | 13:03 | |
| which they changed within a month or two, | 13:06 | |
| the fashionable crowd has little to blame itself for | 13:08 | |
| when it comes to their 1973 real GNP projections. | 13:11 | |
| The emphasis there is on the word real. | 13:16 | |
| But of course the upwards surge of food and decontroled | 13:18 | |
| industrial prices, was not foreseen in advance. | 13:21 | |
| It wasn't foreseen in advance by the people in Washington, | 13:25 | |
| who made the January 11 1973 decision | 13:28 | |
| to decontrol and end phase two, | 13:32 | |
| and it wasn't foreseen in advance by | 13:35 | |
| Wharton, DRI, Chase, et cetera. | 13:38 | |
| And this has been a recurring pattern. | 13:42 | |
| Surprise. | 13:46 | |
| During and after the event, | 13:47 | |
| at the virulence of the inflation, | 13:49 | |
| wisdom after the event, in that demonstrating | 13:51 | |
| that it did after all | 13:54 | |
| fit in with past patterns of experience. | 13:55 | |
| And I actually don't know of any exception | 13:58 | |
| to this generalization. | 14:00 | |
| And monetarists have generally been no better | 14:03 | |
| in this regard, according to my records, | 14:05 | |
| although some have thought that there is somehow | 14:09 | |
| a closer link between M & P than between M and money GNP | 14:11 | |
| equals price times quantity. | 14:17 | |
| Now, off course over a very long period of time, | 14:21 | |
| if you are able from trend considerations | 14:24 | |
| of productive potential | 14:27 | |
| and average degree to which we realize | 14:32 | |
| our productive potential if, for those reasons | 14:34 | |
| we were able to predict Q, | 14:37 | |
| then you can from the quantity equation of exchange | 14:38 | |
| be pretty sure | 14:42 | |
| of saying something sensible about the | 14:44 | |
| long run relationship between the | 14:47 | |
| stock of M and the price level. | 14:49 | |
| Even then off course there are some trends in | 14:54 | |
| the velocity of money which have to be made. | 14:58 | |
| But we're not talking about short run | 15:02 | |
| and intermediate run forecasting, and the | 15:03 | |
| logic of monetarism itself | 15:11 | |
| is that it's the product of price times quantity, | 15:15 | |
| which aught to be related to the | 15:18 | |
| past rates of change of various definitions | 15:21 | |
| of the money supply, with fairly long and variable lags. | 15:25 | |
| To be sure, when it comes to predicting the future | 15:31 | |
| of price level, some economist have been | 15:35 | |
| less unlucky in their guesses than others. | 15:38 | |
| But we all know what the corollary of that proposition is. | 15:41 | |
| What seems to have thrown the economist fraternity off | 15:45 | |
| is the fact that the Phillip's curve | 15:49 | |
| seems to have worsened, | 15:52 | |
| both in the eyes of those who belief in the Phillips Curve | 15:54 | |
| and the eyes of those who don't. | 15:57 | |
| And who use a different language to describe | 15:59 | |
| the same disappointing effect upon wages and costs | 16:03 | |
| generally of each degree of stagnation. | 16:08 | |
| Improvement in the rate of inflation, | 16:12 | |
| 18 months ahead, | 16:15 | |
| is a mirage that economists keep seeing before their eyes, | 16:17 | |
| but just as the rail road tracks never seem to meet | 16:23 | |
| as they appeared to do ten miles back, | 16:28 | |
| so that return to normalcy | 16:31 | |
| in the rate of inflation, never seems to occur. | 16:35 | |
| Not even after we have euphemistically | 16:39 | |
| redefined normalcy to permit of not stable prices | 16:41 | |
| not reasonably stable prices 1% per year, | 16:46 | |
| but even when we talk about | 16:50 | |
| 2,5% annual rates of inflation or more. | 16:52 | |
| I remind that it is only a week back | 16:57 | |
| that the official government forecast | 17:01 | |
| for the end of 1973 was for the rate | 17:03 | |
| of increase of prices of 2.5 to 3%, | 17:06 | |
| that is something like a third | 17:09 | |
| of the rate of increase that we actually were enjoying. | 17:12 | |
| Paradoxically as soon as the analysts | 17:16 | |
| stopped underestimating wage increases, | 17:19 | |
| they began to underestimate general pride increases. | 17:22 | |
| One suspects that two things are involved; | 17:26 | |
| wishful thinking and perhaps a change | 17:29 | |
| in the structural difficulty of the economy | 17:32 | |
| in experiencing steady or slowly growing price levels. | 17:34 | |
| What usually happens when people's | 17:40 | |
| predictions go wrong, is that they find alibis | 17:42 | |
| in contra factual predictions | 17:45 | |
| incapable of being falsified or corroborated. | 17:48 | |
| Thus some say an alibi: | 17:52 | |
| it is price controls that have caused | 17:54 | |
| the error in my forecasts in either direction, | 17:56 | |
| but off course we shall never know | 17:59 | |
| what the world would have been like | 18:01 | |
| without those price controls. | 18:03 | |
| Or they say, if the FED would do something, | 18:05 | |
| this or that, which actually there is | 18:08 | |
| no betting odds that the FED would do, | 18:10 | |
| then the really would agree with my forecast. | 18:14 | |
| Much of the disagreement from policy, | 18:17 | |
| but not all, comes from differences between advisors, | 18:19 | |
| on how much sacrifice a short term welfare | 18:23 | |
| their willing invest now and in the near future | 18:26 | |
| for some hypothetical better behavior | 18:29 | |
| of the economy in the more distant future. | 18:31 | |
| Those with a low rate of time discount | 18:34 | |
| who will cheerfully recommend the flyer | 18:37 | |
| in seito masochistic losterity, | 18:40 | |
| are likely by the Darwinian process of politics | 18:43 | |
| to find themselves not in power | 18:46 | |
| for the period of time they say their therapy requires. | 18:48 | |
| You know there are all sorts of people | 18:54 | |
| who say if the Government only do | 18:56 | |
| what I tell them to do, namely | 18:58 | |
| be tough, hang in there tough, | 19:00 | |
| cause a recession, temporary recession, | 19:04 | |
| then we'll get back on the beam | 19:08 | |
| including the beam of my own regression equations. | 19:10 | |
| That's a very safe gambit to pursue | 19:14 | |
| because there is very little likelihood | 19:17 | |
| in our populous democracy, | 19:21 | |
| that if you advice that to the prince or the president | 19:23 | |
| that you'll stay in a power, | 19:26 | |
| in a position of power and advice. | 19:27 | |
| Lesson number eight. | 19:34 | |
| We have discovered that in recent years, | 19:35 | |
| the US economy has been remarkably unprone | 19:38 | |
| to swings of inventory accumulation | 19:41 | |
| such as characterized our past history. | 19:44 | |
| Those who were predicting a 1974 genuine recession | 19:47 | |
| prior to the post mid-east war energy crises, | 19:53 | |
| they were counting on just such an inventory | 19:58 | |
| slingshot effect to give them their downturn. | 20:01 | |
| But they have had to look elsewhere for their recession. | 20:05 | |
| Namely, as we've been discussing in these tapes, | 20:08 | |
| to the energy situation. | 20:11 | |
| A lesson like lesson eight can be | 20:16 | |
| a very dangerous lesson to learn, | 20:18 | |
| if we learn that | 20:21 | |
| the US economy is unprone | 20:23 | |
| to swings of inventory accumulation | 20:25 | |
| just as that ceases to be the case | 20:27 | |
| and I note that some recent new forecast | 20:30 | |
| that I've been getting by some analysts | 20:34 | |
| do look for considerable inventory accumulation | 20:37 | |
| in 1974. | 20:41 | |
| I think we should suspend judgment and | 20:43 | |
| wait for some signs of that before we belief in it | 20:47 | |
| precisely because we've been burned | 20:50 | |
| so often in so many quarters in making such forecasts | 20:52 | |
| in the last eight, ten, twelve quarters. | 20:56 | |
| This stability of | 21:01 | |
| inventory behavior of the American Economy, | 21:04 | |
| it seems to me is particularly paradoxical | 21:07 | |
| because in an age of inflation | 21:09 | |
| it would be less than excusable | 21:11 | |
| for a good business manager | 21:14 | |
| to try to accumulate inventory and | 21:19 | |
| successfully to accumulate inventory | 21:21 | |
| just when it will help you to have a | 21:23 | |
| an active inventory policy it would appear | 21:26 | |
| that American industry seems to be in fact | 21:29 | |
| following a very stable conservative, | 21:32 | |
| you might even say sluggish inventory policy. | 21:37 | |
| Lesson number nine. | 21:40 | |
| We have learned that a micro event, | 21:42 | |
| such as an Arab Oil boycott, | 21:44 | |
| can loom large as a macro economic depressant. | 21:47 | |
| And actually as we've been seeing, | 21:52 | |
| if the boycott is more than a charade, | 21:54 | |
| more than a passing thing, | 21:57 | |
| most experts now do agree, | 21:59 | |
| that real output will decline in this first half of 1974. | 22:02 | |
| But we realize alas that our King's Fischer | 22:07 | |
| Macro Economic Tools, do not tell us how to handle | 22:11 | |
| such a micro economic restriction | 22:15 | |
| on supply and productivity. | 22:17 | |
| I mean how to handle it for the purpose | 22:19 | |
| of making better forecasts. | 22:21 | |
| It is not even clear that we should call | 22:24 | |
| such an energy induced downturn a recession | 22:26 | |
| since it may not involve much wastage | 22:30 | |
| between our actual GNP and our producible GNP. | 22:33 | |
| However to the extend that gasoline scares | 22:37 | |
| hurt the auto business | 22:39 | |
| and hurt the suburban building market, | 22:40 | |
| some of the same secondary effects | 22:43 | |
| of conventional recession will become operative | 22:45 | |
| calling for some of the same conventional | 22:48 | |
| lean-against-the-wind policy measures. | 22:52 | |
| Lesson number 10. | 22:56 | |
| The conventional wisdom about improvement | 22:59 | |
| of the balance of payments, | 23:01 | |
| from depreciating of a currency | 23:03 | |
| seems in 1973 at long last, | 23:06 | |
| to receive some support from the factual evidence. | 23:10 | |
| There has certainly been a lot of | 23:15 | |
| more important things to worry about in recent years | 23:16 | |
| than the way the dollar will move, | 23:20 | |
| has moved, up or down, | 23:24 | |
| in the somewhat flexible | 23:26 | |
| foreign exchange rate markets of the world. | 23:28 | |
| And the depreciated Dollar | 23:31 | |
| has finally resulted in our | 23:34 | |
| developing a balance of trade surplus, | 23:38 | |
| much needed, we still don't have enough of that, | 23:44 | |
| and also developing an upward trend | 23:47 | |
| in our balance on current account. | 23:49 | |
| The conventional wisdom does seem | 23:54 | |
| to have been working. | 23:55 | |
| On the other side we see in Japan at least | 23:57 | |
| that the appreciated Yen, | 24:01 | |
| has resulted, | 24:04 | |
| I must say in combination with a determined effort | 24:07 | |
| by the Japanese Government to play ball, | 24:10 | |
| to get rid of their surplus, | 24:13 | |
| well has resulted in their getting rid | 24:16 | |
| of their current surplus | 24:19 | |
| and they're actually have been losing reserves, | 24:21 | |
| moreover the clean floating | 24:25 | |
| or somewhat clean floating | 24:29 | |
| Yen Dollar exchange rate has resulted in | 24:32 | |
| a upward movement at long last | 24:36 | |
| of the Dollar relative to the Yen. | 24:39 | |
| My recollection is that in March, when I was in Japan, | 24:41 | |
| at par to the worst of the situation, | 24:45 | |
| the Dollar had sunk so low | 24:48 | |
| that at times I would get only 255 Yen to the Dollar. | 24:52 | |
| If it stabilizes, I remember a day facto | 24:58 | |
| in end of March at 265. | 25:04 | |
| Well it's now, | 25:07 | |
| the dollar has appreciated, | 25:10 | |
| and you now get | 25:13 | |
| 280 Yen to the Dollar, | 25:16 | |
| but more than that I noticed on six months contracts ahead | 25:19 | |
| the quoted rate was 321 Yen to the Dollar. | 25:23 | |
| Well, ten lessons, | 25:30 | |
| ten minutes, | 25:33 | |
| it's taken more than ten minutes, | 25:37 | |
| and I've used up almost all of my time, | 25:40 | |
| and I still haven't in fact drawn all the lessons | 25:43 | |
| that are taught by our recent times. | 25:46 | |
| I ought not to finish without giving one extra lesson, | 25:50 | |
| one to grow wise on, so to speak. | 25:55 | |
| Let's call it lesson 11. | 25:59 | |
| Lesson 11. | 26:02 | |
| Events of the last half dozen years, | 26:04 | |
| have shown us how much economics | 26:06 | |
| remains an art rather than a science. | 26:08 | |
| Economics is exciting, | 26:11 | |
| because what we study is hard, not easy. | 26:13 | |
| Once again I think experience has taught us | 26:17 | |
| the hard way that eclecticism in economics | 26:19 | |
| is to para phrase Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes, | 26:23 | |
| not so much a desirability as a necessity. | 26:27 | |
| - | If you have any comments or questions | 26:31 |
| for Professor Samuelson, address them to | 26:33 | |
| Instructional Dynamics Incorporated, | 26:35 | |
| 166 East Superior Street, Chicago, Illinois, 60611. | 26:36 |
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