From The Collected Works of Milton Friedman, compiled and edited by Robert Leeson and Charles G. Palm.
“Paul Samuelson” by Milton Friedman Newsweek, 9 November 1970, p. 80 ©The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC
My distinguished colleague in this space, Prof. Paul A. Samuelson, has just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is the third person so honored, the first prize having been awarded last year jointly to professors Ragnar Frisch of Norway and Jan Tinbergen of the Netherlands. The award to Professor Samuelson is a well-deserved honor for scientific work over many years.
The readers of this space know Paul Samuelson as a witty, informed and often acerbic commentator on current affairs, as a “liberal” supporter of the economic policies of the Kennedy and Johnson years, and as a critic of current Nixon economic policy.
Millions of college graduates know Paul Samuelson for his economics textbook, which has been the leading elementary text in the United States for two decades, has sold nearly 3 million copies, and is almost surely the best-selling book on economics ever published in the Western world.
Professional economists know Paul Samuelson as a mathematical economist who has ranged widely and deeply, who has helped to reshape and improve the theoretical foundations of our subject. This is the work for which this remarkably versatile man won the Nobel Prize. In the words of the announcement, the prize was awarded “for the scientific work through which he has developed static and dynamic economic theory and actively contributed to raising the level of analysis in economic science.”
In 1947, at the age of 32, Paul Samuelson published “Foundations of Economic Analysis.” The book immediately established his reputation as a brilliant and original mathematical economist. It presents a systematic statement of static economic theory—the theory of the simultaneous determination of the variables that characterize the persistent “state” of the economic system. Far more important, it also presents a systematic analysis of dynamic theory—the process of adjustment from one state of the system to another—and links the two by the famous “correspondence principle.”
Many of Paul Samuelson’s most important contributions to economic science are in articles in professional journals. These were collected and republished a few years ago in two volumes running to nearly 2,000 pages entitled “Collected Scientific Papers of Paul Samuelson.” They cover an extraordinary range: consumer behavior (the theory of revealed preference), international trade (factor-equalization theorem), business cycles (a synthesis of the principles of the accelerator and the multiplier), linear programing, and many other technical subjects. They display the clarity of exposition and felicity of expression that readers of his column have come to expect. Yet the approach and subject matter are wholly different. The approach is typically the sophisticated application of advanced mathematics; the subject matter is the formal body of economic theory.
1 From The Collected Works of Milton Friedman, compiled and edited by Robert Leeson and Charles G. Palm.
Beyond his own work, Paul Samuelson has been the leader in creating a great center of economic study and research at MIT, raising a run-of-the-mill department to one of the premier departments in the world.
The layman has a vision of economists as a quarrelsome tribe who never agree. There is an element of validity in this vision. Paul Samuelson and I, for example, disagree frequently, strongly and publicly on matters of public policy.
But the vision is also distorted. Even in areas of public policy—from tariffs to the SST—there is wide agreement among economists. Time and again, I have been impressed that when economists of whatever ideological hue engage in economic discussion with a group containing persons from other disciplines, their family quarrels are suppressed in brief order and they are as one against the rest. Disagreement among economists on public policy seldom reflects a difference in economic analysis proper but rather in judgment about quantitative magnitude, goals to be pursued, or the time span to be considered, or political considerations outside economics.
Economics is a scientific discipline that has a core that is common to almost all professional economists. Naturally, economists devote little professional research and writing—except in textbooks—to this common core. They concentrate on the issues that are on the frontier where economics is being made rather than taught or applied. That is where the action is, where the differences emerge. That is where Paul Samuelson has made his scientific contribution.
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Compiled by Robert Leeson and Charles Palm as part of their “Collected Works of Milton Friedman” project.
Reformatted for the Web.
10/25/12
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