Wealth & Money Quote by Paul Samuelson

Samuelson lands the punchline by putting three temples of “easy money” in the same sentence: the casino, the racetrack, and the respectable brokerage office. The joke is that only the first two are socially coded as gambling. By slipping Merrill Lynch into that lineup, he punctures the middle-class fantasy that Wall Street is where risk magically turns into merit, and that professionals reliably beat the odds.

The specific intent is didactic, but not preachy. Samuelson is warning ordinary investors against the intoxicating idea of outsmarting markets. Las Vegas and Churchill Downs are honest about their edge: the house and the track take their cut, and the crowd provides liquidity for a few winners and many losers. The brokerage office, by contrast, sells the vibe of expertise and access. The subtext: fees, spreads, taxes, and overconfidence can make “serious” investing feel like a skill game while functioning, for most participants, like a negative-sum wager.

Context matters. Samuelson helped popularize the efficient-market intuition for a broad audience: prices quickly incorporate available information, so persistent, above-market returns are rare and hard to distinguish from luck. His triad also nods to incentives. In all three places, a small group reliably gets rich - not typically the bettors or the clients, but the institutions that run the games and skim from volume. It’s a clean, modern piece of economic realism: the easiest money is often made selling the dream of easy money.