Paul Samuelson

Origins and early life

Paul Anthony Samuelson was born in Gary, Indiana, on 15 May 1915, to the pharmacist Frank Samuelson and Ella Lipton, in a family he later described as made up of upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants from Poland who had prospered in the First World War, because Gary was a brand new steel town when they arrived. The family moved to Chicago in 1923; he took his first degree at the University of Chicago in 1935 and said he had been born as an economist at eight in the morning on 2 January 1932, in a classroom there, during a lecture on Malthus.

He finished his doctorate at Harvard in 1941 with a thesis called Foundations of Analytical Economics, and moved the year before to MIT as an assistant professor, a move his biographer attributes to the antisemitism then open in the Harvard economics department, which Samuelson named in a letter of 1989.

Work and career

He stayed at MIT until his death. The thesis became Foundations of Economic Analysis in 1947, and it did something simple and radical: it showed that consumer choice, the theory of the firm, trade, welfare and public finance are the same maximisation problem wearing different clothes, and wrote them in one mathematical language. The textbook that followed in 1948, Economics: An Introductory Analysis, taught the subject to the world for two generations and is the best-selling economics textbook ever written.

Later years

He advised Kennedy and Johnson, argued weekly with Milton Friedman in the pages of Newsweek, received the first Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences given to an American in 1970 and the National Medal of Science in 1996, and died on 13 December 2009.