Paul Samuelson

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Paul Samuelson bigraphy, stories - American economist

Paul Samuelson : biography

15 May 1915 – 13 December 2009

Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009) was an American economist, and the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The Swedish Royal Academies stated, when awarding the prize, 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" Economic historian Randall E. Parker calls him the "Father of Modern Economics", and The New York Times considered him to be the "foremost academic economist of the 20th century".

He was author of the largest-selling economics textbook of all time: Economics: An Introductory Analysis, first published in 1948. It was the second American textbook to explain the principles of Keynesian economics and how to think about economics, and the first one to be successful,Samuelson’s text was preceded by the 1947 The Elements of Economics by Lorie Tarshis, which did not ultimately prove successful; see discussion. and is now in its 19th edition, having sold nearly 4 million copies in 40 languages. James Poterba, former head of MIT’s Department of Economics, noted that by his book, Samuelson "leaves an immense legacy, as a researcher and a teacher, as one of the giants on whose shoulders every contemporary economist stands". In 1996, when he was awarded the National Medal of Science, considered America’s top science honor, President Bill Clinton commended Samuelson for his "fundamental contributions to economic science" for over 60 years.

He entered the University of Chicago at age 16, during the depths of the Great Depression, and received his PhD in economics from Harvard. After graduating, he became an assistant professor of economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when he was 25 years of age and a full professor at age 32. In 1966, he was named Institute Professor, MIT’s highest faculty honor. He spent his career at MIT where he was instrumental in turning its Department of Economics into a world-renowned institution by attracting other noted economists to join the faculty, including Robert M. Solow, Franco Modigliani, Robert C. Merton, Joseph E. Stiglitz, and Paul Krugman, all of whom went on to win Nobel Prizes.

He served as an advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and 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 took the Keynesian perspective, and Friedman represented the Monetarist perspective. Samuelson died on December 13, 2009, at the age of 94.

Memberships

  • member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, Fellow of Royal Society of London
  • fellow of the American Philosophical Society and the British Academy;
  • member and past President (1961) of the American Economic Association
  • member of the editorial board and past-President (1951) of the Econometric Society
  • fellow, council member and past Vice-President of the Royal Economic Society.
  • member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Fields of interest

As professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Samuelson worked in many fields including:

  • Welfare economics, 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 (Collected Scientific Papers, v. 2, ch. 77; Fischer, 1987, p. 236).
  • Public finance theory, in which he is particularly known for his work on determining the optimal allocation of resources in the presence of both public goods and private goods.
  • 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 (Collected Scientific Papers, v. 1, ch. 21).
  • 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.