Legal Commentary

Paul Samuelson, Ave Atque Vale

By Kenneth Anderson

Paul Samuelson has died, at the age of 94.  From the New York Times obituary:

In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Mr. Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from one that ruminates about economic issues to one that solves problems, answering questions about cause and effect with mathematical rigor and clarity.

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,? said Robert M. Solow, a fellow Nobel laureate and colleague.of Mr. Samuelson?s at M.I.T.

Mr. Samuelson attracted a brilliant roster of economists to teach or study at the university, among them Mr. Solow as well as such other future Nobel laureates as George A. Akerlof, Robert F. Engle III, Lawrence R. Klein, Paul Krugman, Franco Modigliani, Robert C. Merton and Joseph E. Stiglitz.

Mr. Samuelson wrote one of the most widely used college textbooks in the history of American education. The book, ?Economics,? first published in 1948, was the nation?s best-selling textbook for nearly 30 years. Translated into 20 languages, it was selling 50,000 copies a year a half century after it first appeared.

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on December 13, 2009 (boomark / email).