Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009), first American Nobel Prize laureate (1970) has died, at the age of 94.
I was lucky to meet him at the M.I.T on the glorious day of November 9, 1989, the day of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the day that symbolized the end of the world system of the communist slavery.
We are all advised against speaking ill of the dead. I shall not. Paul Samuelson was a witty, humorous and very friendly and pleasant man. He was the only one I knew that rivaled Murray Rothbard in the elegance of wearing bow ties.
When I was learning economics in the USSR in the 1970s Samuelson was the only Western economist whose textbook was translated into Russian. I remember his famous graph depicting dynamics of per capita GNP in the Soviet Union and the United States according to which the USSR would surpass the US in the standard of living by 1990. He frankly admitted to me that that was mistake. “Who could know that it was all fake?”
His “Economics” was the most widely used college textbooks in the history of the world. First published in 1948, it was translated into 22 languages, and was selling over 50,000 copies a year making his author the richest economist after Ricardo.
Mr. Samuelson, an uncle of Lawrence Summers, influenced and advised famous mainstream economists and Nobel laureates Robert Solow, Paul Krugman, George Akerlof, Robert Engle III, Robert C. Merton, Lawrence Klein, Franco Modigliani and Joseph Stiglitz.
Robert M. Solow, a fellow Nobel laureate and colleague of Samuelson’s at M.I.T. pointed out that when economists “sit down with a piece of paper to calculate or analyze something, you would have to say that no one was more important in providing the tools they use and the ideas that they employ than Paul Samuelson”.
Samuelson was fully aware of his world-wide influence. He declared that “I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws — or crafts its advanced treatises — if I can write its economics textbooks”.
In his textbook he praised central planning and predicted the future higher standard of living in the communist world. Murray Rothbard reviewed the book in the following words:
“Samuelson’s Economics differs from its rivals largely in being bigger, more indigestible, and filled with the flip and unsupported wisecracks with which Samuelson is wont to dismiss deviant economic views.”
Paul Samuelson’s legacy is overwhelming – he will not write any more textbooks, but he will still command thoughts and deeds of academics and government officials. As Paul Krugman, his best and brightest student and admirer wrote: “It’s hard to convey the full extent of Samuelson’s greatness. Most economists would love to have written even one seminal paper — a paper that fundamentally changes the way people think about some issue. Samuelson wrote dozens: from international trade to finance to growth theory to speculation to well, just about everything, underlying much of what we know is a key Samuelson paper that set the agenda for generations of scholars.”
Paul Samuelson translated incomprehensible Keynesian scribble into plain English and made it official ideology of American government, other world leaders, and American Economics Association. He advised the Department of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve Board, the Bureau of the Budget and the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.
Samuelson was asked by Kennedy, Johnson and Carter to become their chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. He refused, in principle, to take any government office because, as he admitted, he did not want to put himself in a position in which he could not say and write what he believed. Unfortunately for all of us, almost everything that this truly gifted and talented man said, wrote and believed in resulted in less freedom, bigger government and widespread poverty here and around the world.
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Dear Bloggers:
I would like to clarify that my brief obituary for Paul Samuelson is based on my limited personal encounter with this man, as well as my acquaintance with his works.
Excellent scientific analysis of his role in the history of economic thought is provided by Robert Higgs in
“The Dangers of Samuelson’s Economic Method” posted at: http://mises.org/daily/2947
many people still believe Lenin’s intentions were good as well
to buzungulus:
higgs provides the answer in the link provided by dr maltsev.
higgs’ is not a favourable personal portrait, either. the dead deserve criticism as much as the living. their actions bear witness to their deeds. samuelson’s ideas, like keynes, were inimical to freedom.
There must be a sense of proportion. Gandhi said, “One who uses coercion is guilty of deliberate violence. Coercion is inhuman…”. Yet he said this while pushing for a massive plan for protectionism called “swadeshi”.
to fallon:
and that’s my point, precisely.
i’d like to ask the millions of indians who suffered greatly (until a couple of decades ago) as a consequence of india’s largely centrally-planned economy whether fine words count more than foul actions.
i’d like to ask the millions of indians who suffered greatly (until a couple of decades ago) as a consequence of india’s largely centrally-planned economy whether fine words count more than foul actions.
So would I, but there are millions we cannot ask (a lot of them children), because they died due to disease, malnutrition and other consequences of intense poverty.
Such is the legacy of the destroyers of economic freedom.
Economics isn’t merely an academic exercise.
Yes Samuelson was profoundly wrong but to be trully evil, consequences of one’s actions must be intended. That doesn’t apply to Samuelson. He was just ignorant.
He was not ignorant and if he was, he was willfully ignorant. Throughout his career there were plenty of Soviet emigre economists (Igor Birman among them) and Soviet emigres to inform him and every other American intellectual.
There is plenty of evidence that he knew exactly what he was advocating. From his own textbooks:
“Economics” 1985 edition, he asks a rhetorical question whether or not Soviet repression was “worth the economic gains”. This, he said, “is one of the most profound dilemmas of human society”.
By the mid 1980′s, the Soviet system was clearly in distress. Samuelson updated his text by adding “But it would be misleading to dwell on the shortcomings. Every economy has its contradictions. … What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth.”
Does this spell ignorance to you?
When we arrived from the Soviet Union in the 1970′s, American academia greeted us with cold indifference at best and venom at worst. As emigres who were willing to risk our lives and leave behind our families, our heritage and every scrap of material wealth, we were too biased. Our accounts were not to be trusted. Apparently, only the Stalin is trusted among American intellectuals. In the two decades since the collapse of the Soviet system, nothing has changed in American Academia. People in these institutions of learning learn absolutely nothing, but to call them merely ignorant is a mistake.
“Who could know that it was all fake?”–Samuelson
LOL!!!!
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