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". "In a career that spanned seven decades, he transformed his field, influenced millions of students and turned MIT into an economics powerhouse"
Samuelson was one of the most influential economists of the latter half of the 20th century."Paul Samuelson: The last of the great general economists died on December 13th, aged 94", The Economist, December 17, 2009 In 1996, he was awarded the National Medal of Science. Samuelson considered mathematics to be the "natural language" for economists and contributed significantly to the mathematical foundations of economics with his book Foundations of Economic Analysis. He was author of the best-selling economics textbook of all time: Economics: An Introductory Analysis, first published in 1948. It was the second American textbook that attempted to explain the principles of Keynesian economics.
Samuelson served as an advisor to President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson, and was a consultant to the United States Treasury, the Bureau of the Budget and the President's Council of Economic Advisers. Samuelson wrote a weekly column for Newsweek magazine along with Chicago School economist Milton Friedman, where they represented opposing sides: Samuelson, as a self described "Cafeteria Keynesian", claimed taking the Keynesian perspective but only accepting what he felt was good in it. By contrast, Friedman represented the monetarist perspective. Together with Henry Wallich, their 1967 columns earned the magazine a Gerald Loeb Special Award in 1968.
Biography
Samuelson was born in Gary, Indiana, on May 15, 1915, to Frank Samuelson, a pharmacist, and Ella Lipton. His family, he later said, was "made up of upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants from Poland who had prospered considerably in World War I, because Gary was a brand new steel-town when my family went there". In 1923, Samuelson moved to Chicago where he graduated from Hyde Park High School (now Hyde Park Career Academy).
Samuelson attended the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1935. He said he was born as an economist at 8:00 am on January 2, 1932, in the University of Chicago classroom. The lecture mentioned as the cause was on the British economist Thomas Malthus, who most famously studied population growth and its effects. Samuelson felt there was a dissonance between neoclassical economics and the way the system seemed to behave; he said Henry Simons and Frank Knight were a big influence on him. He next completed his Master of Arts degree in 1936, and his Doctor of Philosophy in 1941 at Harvard University. He won the David A. Wells Prize in 1941 for writing the best doctoral dissertation at Harvard University in economics, for a thesis titled "Foundations of Analytical Economics", which later turned into Foundations of Economic Analysis. As a graduate student at Harvard, Samuelson studied economics under Joseph Schumpeter, Wassily Leontief, Gottfried Haberler, and the "American Keynes" Alvin Hansen.
Samuelson moved to MIT as an assistant professor in 1940 and remained there until his death. Samuelson's biographer argues that a central reason for Samuelson's move from Harvard to MIT was the anti-Semitism that was famously widespread at Harvard at the time. In a 1989 letter to his friend Henry Rosovsky, Samuelson blamed anti-Semitism in Harvard economics above all on chair Harold Burbank, as well as on Edward Chamberlin, John H. Williams, John D. Black, and Leonard Crum.
Samuelson's family included many well-known economists, including brother Robert Summers, sister-in-law Anita Summers, brother-in-law Kenneth Arrow and nephew Larry Summers.
During his seven decades as an economist, Samuelson's professional positions included: Assistant professor of economics at MIT, 1940; associate professor, 1944. Member of the Radiation Laboratory 1944–45. Professor of international economic relations (part-time) at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1945. Guggenheim Fellowship from 1948 to 1949 Professor of economics at MIT beginning in 1947 and Institute Professor beginning in 1962. Vernon F. Taylor Visiting Distinguished Professor at Trinity University (Texas) in spring 1989.
Death Samuelson died after a brief illness on December 13, 2009, at the age of 94. His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. James M. Poterba, an economics professor at MIT and the president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, commented that Samuelson "leaves an immense legacy, as a researcher and a teacher, as one of the giants on whose shoulders every contemporary economist stands". Susan Hockfield, the president of MIT, said that Samuelson "transformed everything he touched: the theoretical foundations of his field, the way economics was taught around the world, the ethos and stature of his department, the investment practices of MIT, and the lives of his colleagues and students"."Economics revolutionary Paul Samuelson dies aged 94", The Daily Telegraph, December 14, 2009 His second wife died in 2019.
Fields of interest As professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Samuelson worked in many fields, including:Fischer, Stanley. "Samuelson, Paul Anthony (1915–2009)". The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Third Edition. Eds. Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Consumer theory, where he pioneered the revealed preference approach, which is a method by which one can discern a consumer's utility function, by observing their behavior. Rather than postulate a utility function or a preference ordering, Samuelson imposed conditions directly on the choices made by individuals – their preferences as revealed by their choices. Welfare economics and public finance theory, in which he popularised the Lindahl–Bowen–Samuelson conditions (criteria for deciding whether an action will improve welfare) and demonstrated in 1950 the insufficiency of a national-income index to reveal which of two social options was uniformly outside the other's (feasible) possibility function, and he is particularly known for his work on determining the optimal allocation of resources in the presence of both public goods and private goods. Capital theory, where he is known for 1958 consumption loans model and a variety of turnpike theorems and involved in Cambridge capital controversy. Finance theory, in which he is known for the random walk hypothesis and efficient-market hypothesis. International economics, where he influenced the development of two important international trade models: the Balassa–Samuelson effect, and the Heckscher–Ohlin model (with the Stolper–Samuelson theorem). Macroeconomics, where he popularized the overlapping generations model as a way to analyze economic agents' behavior across multiple periods of time, developed multiplier-accelerator model, analyzed the Phillips curve, and contributed to formation of the neoclassical synthesis.Tobin, James. "Macroeconomics and fiscal policy". Paul Samuelson and Modern Economic Theory. Eds. E. Cary Brown and Robert M. Solow. McGraw-Hill, 1983.
Impact Samuelson is considered one of the founders of neo-Keynesian economics and a seminal figure in the development of neoclassical economics. In awarding him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, the committee stated:
He was also essential in creating the neoclassical synthesis, which ostensibly incorporated Keynesian and neoclassical principles and still dominates current mainstream economics. In 2003, Samuelson was one of the ten Nobel Prize–winning economists signing the Economists' statement opposing the Bush tax cuts.
Samuelson believed unregulated markets have drawbacks, he stated, "free markets do not stabilise themselves. Zero regulating is vastly suboptimal to rational regulating. Libertarianism is its own worst enemy!" Samuelson strongly criticised Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, arguing their opposition to state intervention "tells us something about them rather than something about Genghis Khan or Franklin Roosevelt. It is paranoid to warn against inevitable slippery slopes ... once individual commercial freedoms are in any way infringed upon."
Aphorisms and quotations Stanislaw Ulam once challenged Samuelson to name one theory in all of the social sciences that is both true and nontrivial. Several years later, Samuelson responded with David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage: "That it is logically true need not be argued before a mathematician; that it is not trivial is attested by the thousands of important and intelligent men who have never been able to grasp the doctrine for themselves or to believe it after it was explained to them."
For many years, Samuelson wrote a column for Newsweek. One article included Samuelson's most quoted remark and a favorite economics joke:
To prove that Wall Street is an early omen of movements still to come in GNP, commentators quote economic studies alleging that market downturns predicted four out of the last five recessions. That is an understatement. Wall Street indexes predicted nine out of the last five recessions! And its mistakes were beauties.
In the early editions of his famous, bestselling economics textbook Paul Samuelson joked that GDP falls when a man "marries his maid".
Publications
Foundations of Economic Analysis
Paul Samuelson's book Foundations of Economic Analysis (1946) is considered his magnum opus. It is derived from his doctoral dissertation, and was inspired by the classical thermodynamic methods.Liossatos, Panagis, S. (2004). "Statistical Entropy in General Equilibrium Theory", (p. 3). Department of Economics, Florida International University. The book proposes to: Examine underlying analogies between central features in theoretical and applied economics and Study how operationally meaningful theorems can be derived with a small number of analogous methods (p. 3), in order to derive "a general theory of economic theories" (Samuelson, 1983, p. xxvi). The book showed how these goals could be parsimoniously and fruitfully achieved, using the language of the mathematics applied to diverse subfields of economics. The book proposes two general hypotheses as sufficient for its purposes: Maximizing behavior of agents (including consumers as to utility and business firms as to profit) and Economic systems (including a market and an economy) in stable equilibrium. The first tenet suggests that all actors, whether firms or consumers, are striving to maximize something. They could be attempting to maximize profits, utility, or wealth, but it did not matter because their efforts to improve their well-being would provide a basic model for all actors in an economic system. His second tenet focuses on providing insight on the workings of equilibrium in an economy. Generally in a market, supply would equal demand. However, he noted that this isn't always the case and that the important thing to look at was a system's natural resting point. Foundations presents the question of how an equilibrium would react when it is moved from its optimal point. Samuelson was also influential in providing explanations on how the changes in certain factors can affect an economic system. For example, he could explain the economic effect of changes in taxes or new technologies.
In the course of analysis, comparative statics, (the analysis of changes in equilibrium of the system that result from a parameter change of the system) is formalized and clearly stated.