Paul Samuelson (1915–2009)
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Who They Were
Paul Samuelson (1915-2009) was an American economist widely regarded as a central figure in turning economics into a rigorously mathematical discipline. His doctoral work became Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947), which argued that a wide range of economic problems share a single mathematical structure, constrained optimisation and comparative statics, and rewrote much of the field accordingly. Based for decades at MIT, he also authored a hugely influential introductory textbook. In 1970 he became the first American laureate of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences; Simon Kuznets followed in 1971. His work spanned macroeconomics, trade, public finance and consumer theory, and he helped train and shape generations of economists. He remains one of the defining figures of postwar economics.
Key Contributions
Samuelson coined the phrase neoclassical synthesis to describe the postwar settlement: Keynesian analysis for the economy in the short run and away from full employment, and neoclassical marginalism for the long run and for individual markets. This framework stitched Keynesian macroeconomics onto neoclassical microeconomics and dominated textbooks into the 1970s. In international trade, he and Wolfgang Stolper showed in 1941 that opening to trade raises the real return to a country's abundant factor and lowers it for the scarce factor, the Stolper-Samuelson theorem, and the formal basis for saying trade creates domestic winners and losers even when a country gains overall. His Foundations recast economic theory in the language of optimisation, and his contributions to comparative advantage place him in a lineage running from Ricardo to Paul Krugman.
On EconRecall
American economist, architect of the neoclassical synthesis, and the first American to win the economics Nobel, in 1970. Play the games that feature Paul Samuelson: