Science & Tech Quote by Paul Samuelson

Samuelson’s line lands like a jab from inside the tent: the Nobel-winning architect of modern macro is telling you his own field doesn’t qualify for the lab coat. The intent isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s reputational triage. By insisting economics “has never been a science,” he rejects the comforting myth that markets can be reduced to stable laws the way physics reduces motion. The sting is in the second clause - “even less now than a few years ago” - which turns a philosophical complaint into a diagnosis of decline. Something got worse, not merely complicated.

Subtext: economics keeps borrowing the authority of science (models, precision, math, prediction) while operating in a domain where the “particles” read the newspaper and change behavior. Human expectations, institutions, politics, and incentives mutate in response to the very theories meant to describe them. When economists present forecasts as if they were weather reports, Samuelson is warning that the discipline is doing branding work, not just knowledge work.

Context matters. Samuelson lived through the mid-century moment when Keynesianism promised steerable economies, and then through the later backlash: stagflation, rational expectations, deregulation, and recurring financial crises that exposed how fragile elegant models can be. “Less now” suggests a field increasingly rewarded for technical sophistication and ideological usefulness, even as real-world prediction and consensus erode.

Rhetorically, it’s a controlled demolition. Samuelson isn’t saying economics is worthless; he’s demanding humility: treat it as a contested, political social inquiry with partial truths, not a machine for certainty. The provocation is aimed at economists who sell inevitability - and at publics eager to buy it.