Paul Samuelson

He fixed his own beginning to a clock time. At eight in the morning on January 2, 1932, in a University of Chicago classroom, a lecturer talked about Malthus, and Samuelson decided afterward that this was the hour he had been born as an economist. He was 16, the son of a pharmacist in Gary, Indiana, from a family he described as upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants from Poland who had done well because Gary was a brand-new steel town. What struck him in that room was a mismatch. The neoclassical theory he was being taught did not describe the economy visible out the window in 1932, and the professors he admired most could not close the gap either. He spent the next 70 years trying to close it with mathematics.

The dissertation became Foundations of Economic Analysis in 1946, a book that borrowed its method from classical thermodynamics and asked what could be derived from two assumptions — that agents maximize something, and that systems settle. It formalized comparative statics and produced the Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function. Two years later came the textbook. Economics sold more than 300,000 copies of every edition through the 1960s and 1970s, went into 41 languages, passed four million copies, and taught Keynes to the world by way of American undergraduates. He took the John Bates Clark Medal in 1947, the first American Nobel in economics in 1970, and the National Medal of Science in 1996, and for years he argued with Milton Friedman in alternating columns in Newsweek. His collected scientific papers run to 388.

Harvard trained him and would not keep him. His biographer argues that the reason he left for MIT in 1940 was the antisemitism of the Harvard economics department, and Samuelson was still itemizing it in 1989, in a letter naming the chairman, Harold Burbank, and four colleagues besides. Nearly half a century had passed. The textbook drew fire from the opposite direction. In 1951 William F. Buckley Jr. gave a chapter of God and Man at Yale to Samuelson's book and another economist's and treated both as communist-inspired, and he defended the charge for the rest of his life. Samuelson had written that he would happily leave the nation's laws to others if he could write its textbooks. Both sides took him at his word.

He died at Belmont, Massachusetts, on December 13, 2009, at 94, after a short illness, having stayed at MIT for 69 years. The synthesis he built — Keynesian machinery bolted onto neoclassical foundations — is still what most of the discipline teaches, which is a strange sort of monument, because being the default means being invisible. His family turned into a small dynasty: his brother, his sister-in-law, his brother-in-law Kenneth Arrow and his nephew Lawrence Summers all made careers in economics. Late on he kept picking fights, signing the 2003 letter of Nobel economists against the Bush tax cuts and writing that free markets do not stabilize themselves and that libertarianism is its own worst enemy.

Paul Samuelson's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Foundations of Economic Analysis book
  His dissertation, remade. Its method came from classical thermodynamics. 1946
• Economics: An Introductory Analysis book
  The best-selling economics textbook ever written — 41 languages, over four million copies 1948
• Economic Theory and Mathematics: An Appraisal article
  His defense of the mathematical turn he had led 1952
• The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure article
  Two pages that founded the modern theory of public goods 1954
• The Collected Scientific Papers of Paul A. Samuelson book
  Seven volumes and 388 papers, running from 1937 to 2009 1966
• Inside the Economist's Mind book
  Interviews with 20th-century economists, co-edited with William A. Barnett 2007

• January 2, 1932 aged 16 Sits through a lecture on Malthus and dates his career from it He was 16 and an undergraduate at the University of Chicago.
• 1935 aged ~20 Takes a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago at 20
• 1940 aged ~25 Leaves Harvard for MIT as an assistant professor His biographer attributes the move principally to antisemitism in the Harvard department.
• 1941 aged ~26 Wins the Wells Prize for the best economics dissertation at Harvard
• 1946 aged ~31 Publishes Foundations of Economic Analysis
• 1948 aged ~33 Publishes Economics, which becomes the best-selling textbook in the field
• 1951 aged ~36 William F. Buckley Jr. attacks the textbook in God and Man at Yale Buckley defended the charge for the rest of his life.
• 1970 aged ~55 Becomes the first American awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics
• December 13, 2009 aged 94 Dies at Belmont, Massachusetts, at 94

• Milton Friedman 1912–2006
  Nobel Prize-winning economist whose free-market ideas profoundly influenced American economic policy. argued with in print for years
• Kenneth Arrow 1921–2017
  Economist whose impossibility theorem and work on general equilibrium, risk, and information reshaped modern economic theory. brother-in-law
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. advised
• Ben Bernanke b. 1953
  Led the Federal Reserve through the 2008 financial crisis and won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics. inherited the synthesis
• Paul Krugman b. 1953
  Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist known for his work on trade and geography. the next public Keynesian