- Person
- Paul Samuelson
- Lived
- 1915–2009
- Field
- Economics
- From
- American
The story
After his studies at Harvard, Paul Samuelson joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an assistant professor of economics in 1940. His biographer has argued that a central reason for the move was the antisemitism then widespread in Harvard's economics department. At MIT the department did not train graduate students and was, in his own later words, a mediocre service department.
Samuelson stayed for the rest of his life and was instrumental in transforming it. He became associate professor in 1944, full professor in 1947 and, according to MIT, Institute Professor in 1966, the university's highest faculty honour. During the war he also worked at MIT's Radiation Laboratory in 1944 and 1945. His first doctoral student, Lawrence Klein, earned his PhD in 1944 and later won a Nobel Prize of his own.
At a 1991 dinner celebrating the creation of the department's Samuelson Chair, he described the department's rise as a scientific miracle: from 1941 to 1960 it went from mediocrity to first place in every foundation's ranking. By the mid-1960s, he joked, the Justice Department's antitrust division was starting to worry about how many of the National Science Foundation's economics fellowships went to MIT.
He insisted the success was not his work alone. Writing in 2000, he credited two factors: MIT's renaissance after the Second World War as a federally supported research centre, and the mathematical revolution in economic theory and statistics, which he called overdue and inevitable, with MIT the logical place for it to flourish. MIT's president Susan Hockfield said his vision created the intensely collaborative culture of the department, and that he transformed even the university's investment practices.
Samuelson kept coming to his office long after retiring in 1985, joking that he would like to go on scribbling his articles on the third floor of the Sloan Building until the end of time. The department head, Ricardo Caballero, said he remained a central figure at every gathering until the very end. The department he helped build remains one of the world's leading centres of economic research and teaching.
Why it matters
The department Samuelson helped build has trained generations of leading economists, policy makers and Nobel laureates.
About Paul Samuelson
MIT economist who gave modern economics its mathematical foundations, wrote the best-selling economics textbook of all time and became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in economics.
More about Paul Samuelson
- Paul Samuelson wrote the best-selling economics textbookPaul Samuelson's Economics: An Introductory Analysis, first published in 1948, became the best-selling economics textbook of all time, translated into 40 languages.
- Paul Samuelson made mathematics the language of economicsPaul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis, published in 1947 from his Harvard thesis, showed how mathematics could make economics a rigorous science.
- Paul Samuelson studied how to provide public goodsPaul Samuelson pioneered the revealed preference approach to consumer choice and showed how to allocate resources between public and private goods.
Sources
- Paul A. Samuelson, economist, dies at 94 MIT News
- Paul Samuelson Wikipedia
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