Paul Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics, died Dec. 13 at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94. The winner of a Nobel Prize in 1970, Samuelson, through his best selling textbook “Economics,” exposed his students to the ideas of British economist John Maynard Keynes.
Samuelson, a native of Gary, Ind., had said his family was “made up of upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants from Poland who had prospered considerably in World War I, because Gary was a brand new steel town when my family went there,” the New York Times reported.
He was an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is credited with turning his area of expertise from a theory-based to action-based discipline, using mathematics to answer questions about cause and effect.
In addition to his role as an academic economist and author, Samuelson consulted for U.S. presidents, members of Congress, the Federal Reserve Board, the U.S. Treasury, the Bureau of Budget, the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and global leaders.
When economists “sit down with a piece of paper to calculate or analyze something, you would have to say that no one was more important in providing the tools they use and the ideas that they employ than Paul Samuelson,” Robert Solow, a fellow Nobel laureate and colleague of Samuelson’s, told the New York Times. — jta