Mafe anticipated my intentions for my weekly post. Paul Samuelson passed away yesterday. I confess that I am one of these young students in Economics that never used his Fondaments of Economics Analysis but there was something enthralling in Paul Samuelson’s figure for me: he was one of the great figures of the “old school”.
What do I mean by “old school”? Well. I have been always fascinated by those men who seem to know the origins and roots of the topic they are dealing with, who are aware of the context and particularity of the issue under study. Furthermore, I admit my unconditional admiration for those persons who are able to cover a broad and varied range of problems and topics because their immense culture and intelligence allows them to avoid the extreme specialization in more and more reduced fields of study. Samuelson was this and much more. He was one of the fathers of the neoclassical analysis in Economics, but he also knew and debate with distinguished methodological and intellectual “rivals” like Friedman or Hayek. Their first years in MIT almost obliged him to be aware of the importance of interdisciplinarity because, as he himself explained, “When I joined the [MIT] (…) in 1940, we were officially the Department of Economics and Social Sciences. Evidently, economics was not itself a social science! Some of my colleagues were psychologists, political scientists, anthropologists and personnel experts. Also statisticians”. What a weird age (at least for today’s perspective) in which Economics was almost subjugated by the other social sciences! Samuelson’s research focused on topics like Public Finance, Welfare Economics, International Economics, Macroeconomics or Consumer Theory, but, besides having been president of the American Economic Association or the Econometric Society, Samuelson was also fellow of the American Philosophical Society or the British Academy. What an eclectic figure!
I will never be a Paul Samuelson but,I admit that, often, when looking at myself as a future economist, I wonder if I will able to be a decent heir of such an admirable and amazing “old school”. I am sorry, Samuelson, Galbraith, Hayek or Friedman if I will not… I am doing my best…
