The dangers of Samuelson's economic method.

• Author: Higgs, Robert
• Position: Etceteras ... - Paul A. Samuelson - Essay

Paul A. Samuelson died on December 13, 2009, at the age of 94. For more than half a century, he was a towering figure in the economics profession and, to some degree, in the wider world. When I was first learning economics, in the 1960s, Samuelson was held up by my teachers as the greatest living economist--a genius, they used to say--and his way of doing economics was generally regarded as virtually defining how to carry out economic analysis scientifically. In the course of my undergraduate and graduate training, I was never given any reason to doubt that assessment.

Indeed, a memorably painful part of my graduate education consisted of my attempts to read and understand Samuelson's landmark book Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947), a treatise in mathematical economic theory, patterned after classical thermodynamics, which set the tone for much of what the cleverest mainstream economists would do for decades to come. The protocol became: build a mathematical model of abstract actors engaged in constrained maximization or minimization of an objective function; prove that the model has a stable equilibrium; show how the model's equilibrium conditions change when its parameters are changed (the so-called method of comparative statics).

I also had the pleasure--if that is the right word--of meeting Samuelson in person once, early in 1968, when I visited the economics department at MIT as a candidate for a job there. At a luncheon seminar with Samuelson and several other members of the department, I experienced firsthand the famous Samuelsonian wit and arrogance. Although the members of the group bantered and joked at one another's expense during the luncheon, as academics commonly do, it was clear to me that Samuelson's jokes at a colleague's expense dominated a colleague's jokes at his expense. This pecking order came as no surprise to me. I was taken aback, however, that the great man also made jokes at my expense. Of course, as an apprehensive and insecure 24 year old looking for a job, I made no jokes at anybody's expense, and certainly not at Samuelson's. More than forty years later, and somewhat wiser in the often ill-mannered ways of academia, I remain disappointed that the acclaimed "greatest living economist," a man who only two years later would become the first American to receive the Nobel prize in economics, would choose to make sport of a mere graduate student.

Mathematics Is the Language, Induction Is the Method

Anyone who has read Samuelson's articles and books, however, knows that his arrogance often stands in prominent display. Whether he was the greatest living economist or not, he often expressed himself with the kind of Olympian condescension that strongly suggests he believed himself to be Numero Uno. I was struck by this quality most recently in reading, strange to say, his 1952 article "Economic Theory and Mathematics--An Appraisal." At the end of the first paragraph, Samuelson writes, "I firmly believe in the virtues of understatement and lack of pretension." Upon encountering this affirmation of authorial modesty, I nearly burst out laughing.

Although Samuelson declares that he comes "not to praise mathematics, but rather to slightly debunk its use in economics," the thrust of his article can...