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Journey's end by Tapas Majumdar

Paul A. Samuelson (May 15, 1915 — December 13, 2009) has often been described as the foremost academic economist of the 20th century. Randall E. Parker, the economic historian, has called him the “Father of Modern Economics”.

All this may be hotly disputed in Chicago, but in any case, Samuelson was the first American to receive the Nobel prize in economic sciences. The Swedish Royal Academy’s citation stated that he “has done more than any other contemporary economist to raise the level of scientific analysis in economic theory”.

Probably this was a correct summing up of his magnificent set of contributions to many parts of economics, fluently using the language of mathematics. I first came across the statement, “Mathematics is a language,” in his Foundations of Economic Analysis, which had exhilarated me 60 years ago. I have to admit, though somewhat shamefacedly, I myself never learnt enough of that language to use it beyond a rudimentary level in my own papers.

Even more important perhaps than his use of mathematics was his use of logic that would place him, in my personal opinion, among the very best economists of all time. Samuelson began his conquest of the theoretical economist’s mind, first, by stating the basic requirement of all economic theorems. It was the necessity of formulating, step by step, what he called “operationally meaningful” propositions, which had to satisfy the criterion of “refutability”. A proposition in economics he would call “meaningless” if it was not patently refutable, if wrong. In fact, Samuelson’s exposition of the logic of this requirement, even as early as in his doctoral dissertation (if I remember correctly), was the first extension to the social sciences (and probably independently visualized too) of Karl Popper’s similar requirement of falsifiability of propositions in science as the prime criterion in his famous The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Thus came into being Samuelson’s concept of “revealed preference” in consumer behaviour theory replacing the indifference curves of J.R. Hicks (also to be a Nobel laureate) and R.G.D. Allen.

Let me talk a little of Samuelson’s astonishing ability in talent scouting and, of course, his ability to get along with widely different characters. When one hears of the resolve of some ministers, bureaucrats and educational experts in Delhi to turn out world-class universities in India by the dozen, I cannot but think of my own subject and of Samuelson turning the Massachusetts Institute of Technology into a world-class centre for economics. He had joined MIT as assistant professor after his PhD at Harvard because, I had once heard, he had not seen much prospect there since — wait a minute — he was Jewish. This, of course, was more than 60 years back. Harvard is obviously quite a different place now.

At MIT, Samuelson was instrumental in turning a mere economics department of an institute of technology into a world-renowned institution by itself. He was able to attract an unbelievably gifted set of economists and persuade them to join the faculty at MIT. The list included Robert Solow, Paul Krugman, Franco Modigliani, Robert Merton and Joseph Stiglitz. All of them had gone on to win their Nobel prizes. I have not heard of any other success story in talent scouting like this.

Samuelson wrote a weekly column for Newsweek magazine along with the famous Chicago school economist, Milton Friedman, who remained his friend and adversary, the two representing opposing sides of the tradition of modern economics: Samuelson took the liberal, Keynesian perspective, and Friedman represented the free-market libertarian view. They carried on with their lively debate in Newsweek. I thought that in these, Samuelson showed his gentle side and his friend the opposite one. I was lucky to watch on television a long debate between the two which was absolutely fascinating. I was, of course, on Samuelson’s side as a listener. I must admit I was a little disappointed to hear Samuelson arguing that one has to respect social conscience even if it is outside the economist’s world of discourse. Later I heard (or perhaps read), Amartya saying something like this. I thought both of them were giving ground unnecessarily because both, in their own ways, had actually expanded the horizon of the science of economics itself. Both had thereby legitimately widened the universe of discourse in economics. Modern economics need not be apologetic about this.

In this context, I wish to pay a tribute to the memory of Paul Samuelson and try to speak of how once he had gone out of his way to help me organize my own thoughts as a young researcher in the 1950s. I never had the opportunity of knowing him in person. But one of my best friends, the late Ajit Biswas, was his student at MIT. Ajit was in the first batch of Smith Mundt and Fulbright scholars selected by the United States Educational Foundation in India and was admitted to MIT for his graduate studies. He had come close to Samuelson — in those days it was still possible for young graduate students to be close to great professors.

I was still only a young teacher at Presidency trying to find my way and had just written a short paper. But it looked to me as if it was outside the purview of economics, although I could not figure out what exactly it was. I had recently read Arrow’s famous book on social choice and the idea of writing that paper had come out of this. Since I did not know whom to ask — Bhabatosh Datta had already gone to the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC — I sent the paper to Ajit to find out. He took it straight to his professor for his opinion. Samuelson wrote a longish letter to me on this paper and gave his advice in detail. I regret to have lost that letter. It said that he thought my exercise was in what he called “political arithmetic” and he had liked it and wanted me to send it to Econometrica for publication. It came out in early 1956, when I had just joined London School of Economics as a PhD student myself. I had, of course, acknowledged Samuelson’s contribution in that paper. His advice helped change my career by telling me what I vaguely had known — that the horizon of modern economics itself was changing. After Samuelson, Arrow and then, of course, Amartya Sen, economists need not have been diffident about including social questions in formal economics and in a wider format.

Paul Samuelson died at the age of 94 — a ripe old age even by modern standards of life expectancy. But he would be missed by those who knew him well enough, and even by people whose lives he touched and influenced without ever knowing it.