Paul Samuelson: A Guru says Dr Subramanian Swamy
If anyone can be called the father of modern analytical and scientific
economics, it is Paul A. Samuelson now sadly deceased at 94. Anyone who has
read economics, even if in the most fleeting way, cannot but recognise his
most perceptive undergraduate economics text-book of all time, in its 19th
edition now. When educated people think of analytical economics today, they
think of Samuelson. Einstein in fact is the Samuelson of physics.
At his 92, I when last I saw him, he was driving his car in Belmont, Massachusetts,
his home area ---a small elite town on the suburb of Cambridge, the town of
Harvard and MIT and as alert as ever. He stopped upon seeing me on the
sidewalk, pulled over and chatted with me about how I was. Since 2000 I have
been going back every summer to Harvard to teach two courses in economics and
I had been meeting him over a one-to-one lunch at his favourite restaurant in
the Charles Hotel complex at Harvard Square. That year I had not yet called
him and he was disapproving.
Whenever I met him, I was just his student, which I had been in 1962-63
cross-registering at MIT which Harvard students could do. In every meeting
with him I had to answer his rapid fire questions about a series of subjects,
and even share delightful gossip. On that summer day on the Belmont sidewalk
it was no different.
Later I became his colleague as co-author on the Theory of Index Numbers,
published our research in the prestigious American Economic Review[1974] and
the Royal Economic Society’s Economic Journal [1984], but I was still treated
as his student to be cared for, and questioned.
Samuelson’s main contribution to modern economics was to use advanced
calculus to show that that economics could be structured on clearly stated on
observable behaviourial assumptions or axioms, objectives, and then by
mathematical deduction deriving economic laws that could be tested on real
life statistical data. He thus made economics a subject of scientific inquiry
to be truly called a science in the sense that propositions in economics
could be ‘proved’ with proofs just as theorems in mathematics were.
Mathematical logic and rigour was all, and little else mattered. Gone thus
were the days of “Shakespearean” economics of Keynes and Galbraith’s art of
expression. Felicity in English no more mattered. Mathematical methods took
its place and thereby Samuelson globalised economics by enabling the little
English knowing scholars such as the Japanese to join in international
discourse and collaboration in research and teaching. Economics thus exploded
on the international scene and became fashionable.
Samuelson worked in two dimensions throughout his life. In one dimension, he
spoke in homely English about the most complicated economic issues. He thus
authored one of the most widely used college textbook in the history of
American education. The book, titled Economics, first published in 1948, was
the globe’s best-selling textbook for nearly 30 years. Translated into 20
languages, and updated periodically it is selling over 50,000 copies a year a
half century after it first appeared. He also wrote a column for Newsweek on
current economic topics.
His second dimension was of mathematical rigour that began with his Harvard
Ph.D. thesis turned book titled “The Foundations of Economic Analysis”. This
is a goldmine for future research even today. When he defended his thesis
before a committee of three Harvard Professors, which all Ph.D candidates
have to do and pass, the story goes that the chairman of the committee
Professor Schumpeter asked his two fellow members after the viva :
“Gentlemen, have we passed ?”
Between these two books, Samuelson re-defined modern economics and made it a
popular yet a science. For that he became the first American to win the then
instituted Nobel Prize in 1970.
The textbook introduced generations of students to the ideas, in simple
language of graphs, of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who in the
1930s developed the theory that modern market economies could become trapped
in depression, that a cut in wages would only mean a cut in demand and hence
of profit, and thus the downward spiral would continue. And it would then
need a strong push from government spending or tax cuts, in addition to
lenient monetary policy, to restore the economy. Thus was born the concept of
the “stimulus”. Laissez faire made way for modern competitive market economic
system in which government had a role to play. In my view this neo-classical
economics destroyed socialism as a theory forever. Never again to rest
comfortably with the view that private markets could cure unemployment
without need of government intervention in terms of stimulus, fiscal, and
monetary policies. No need therefore for “commanding heights” of government
ownership.
That lesson has been reinforced in 2008, when the international economy
slipped into the steepest downturn since the Great Depression when Keynesian
economics was born. When the Depression began, governments stood pat or made
matters worse by trying to urge wage cuts, to balance fiscal budgets, and
erecting trade barriers. But 80 years later, most industrialised countries
took corrective action, raising government spending, cutting taxes, keeping
exports and imports flowing and driving short-term interest rates to near
zero. Samuelson made Keynes immortal and Depression containable.
Paul Antony Samuelson was born May 15, 1915 in Gary, Ind. the son of Frank
Samuelson, a pharmacist, and the former Ella Lipton. His family, he said, was
‘made up of upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants from Poland’. His family later
moved to Chicago. Young Paul attended Hyde Park High School in Chicago.
After receiving his bachelor’s degree from Chicago in 1935, he went to
Harvard as a graduate student to do a Ph.D.
Among Samuelson’s fellow students at Harvard was Marion Crawford. They
married in 1938. Samuelson earned his master’s degree from Harvard in 1936
and a Ph.D. formally in 1941. He wrote his thesis in 1937. In 1940, Harvard
offered him an instructorship[ the Harvard equivalent of Assistant Professor
which in turn equalled Associate Professor elsewhere], which he accepted, but
a month later MIT invited him to become an assistant professor i.e., same
rank as Harvard’s Instructor.
But jealousy and some suspect anti-Semitism of the late thirties made Harvard
deny promotion to retain him even though he had by then developed an
international following. Nobel Laureate Robert Solow, his former student and
later colleague at MIT, jokingly said of the Harvard economics department of
that time: “You could be disqualified for a job if you were either smart or
Jewish or Keynesian. So what chance did this smart, Jewish, Keynesian have?”
Marion Samuelson died in 1978. Samuelson is survived by his second wife,
Risha Clay Samuelson and six children from his first marriage.
Fresh from India, and armed with a B.A Honours in Mathematics and Master’s in
Mathematical Statistics I first met Samuelson in his office in September 1962
wanting to be his student cross-registering in the most advanced mathematical
economics course of MIT. I had arrived in Cambridge town on a Harvard
scholarship for a Ph.D., thanks to the recommendation Dr. Tarlok Singh of the
Planning Commission which Harvard honoured. Samuelson used to select every
year only twenty students, out of about 200 that applied, expecting to groom
them as scholars. I wondered then whether I would be chosen.
But by then I was already bit of a sensation in academia because as a M.A.
student at Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, I had published a research
paper in the world’s then most prestigious journal called Econometrica,
demolishing using Integral Calculus, P.C. Mahalanobis’ claim to fame called
Fractile Graphical Analysis published earlier in the same journal.
Mahalanobis who was invited by the editor to rebut my criticism, had no answer.
In Samuelson’s class as his student, once while he was lecturing on the
theory of consumer behavior wrote on the blackboard a series of equations to
derive a theorem. From my desk I raised my hand and said “You have one
equation wrong, so you will not be able to prove the theorem”. There was
stunned silence in class. Samuelson then walked to where I was seated and
glowered “What did you say ?”. I held my ground and offered to rectify what
was a small careless mistake which all geniuses commit on the blackboard in
class. He made me go to the blackboard and write out the correct equation
which I did. Then sternly he said: “See me after class”. My classmates all
thought that was the end of me and one even said to me “have you got your
return ticket to India?”
But it was instead the beginning of me and of a relationship. When I saw him
after class he said to my utter joy :“I think you and I should write a joint
paper some day”. This we did ten years later but he me helped in the interim
on a number of my papers published in my own name, and also thanked me in
footnotes of his published papers for correcting him or for giving him leads.
He, and my thesis adviser Simon Kuznets at Harvard, thus launched my career.
I became Teaching Fellow even as a student, then Instructor soon after,
breezing through a Ph.D in the shortest possible time of 18 months, and
Assistant Professor all at Harvard within three years of my arrival in
Cambridge.
Amartya Sen invited me to join the Delhi School of Economics as a full Professor
in early 1968 stating in a hand written letter that my “gaddi was being
dusted”. I therefore spent three months in the summer of 1968 at the Delhi
School of Economics as Visiting Professor, before returning back to Harvard
with the intention of winding up and joining as Professor of Economics at the
Delhi School. But I did not realize then that the Left triumvirate of Sen,
K.N.Raj and S. Chakravarty had in the three months discovered that I was not
only not ideologically neutral or soft like Bhagwati, but hard anti-Left and
wanted to dismantle the Soviet planning system in India besides producing the
atom bomb. So when I arrived in India in late 1969 this triumvirate scuttled
my ascending the dusted gaddi. Sen was at his hypocritical best in explaining
to me his volte face.
Samuelson was enraged when heard this and perhaps felt empathy because of his
own experience in the late thirties at Harvard, and urged me to return. When
I returned to Harvard to teach in the 1971 summer, Samuelson told me “Stay here
and write a treatise on Index Numbers and you will be worthy of a prize”. But
I was in a fighting mood and told him I would return.
Fortunately there was a Professorship open at IIT Delhi. Dr. Manmohan Singh
was the Chairman of the Selection Committee. Samuelson with Kuznets[1971
Nobel Laureate] wrote the Committee strong letters of recommendation. Armed
with it, Dr. Singh did not wilt under the huge pressure mounted by the
triumvirate and I was appointed Professor of Economics in October 1971. But it
did not last long. The triumvirate then persuaded Mrs. Gandhi that I was a
closet RSS with chauvinist views, and a danger to her. With the KGB favourite
Nurul Hasan as Education Minister, I was easily sacked in December 1972 [but
re-instated by court in 1991].
I then joined politics since no academic avenues were now open. I continued
to return to Harvard for the summer to teach, and got nothing but warmth and
welcome from Samuelson each time. During the Emergency, Henry Rosovsky
another famous Harvard economist, became Dean and he appointed me Visiting
Professor for the year 1976-77. Mrs. Gandhi sent an emissary to him to cancel
my appointment! But Henry was no pushover. He maintained that I was still an
IIT Professor till the courts in India pronounced on it.
By now Samuelson was convinced that I had responded to a higher call by going
into Indian politics. He then encouraged me to fight on. He wrote a powerful
column in the Newsweek against the Emergency and even signed a petition of
Nobel Laureates to the US President condemning the jailing without trial of
140,000 persons. It was most unusual for him, but it encouraged me to fight
on.
Although I did collaborate with him again on Index Numbers in the early
eighties, Samuelson remained sympathetic from then on to my choice of a
political career over academics. I met him often in the Faculty Club for
lunch after I went back to Harvard for a year and half in 1985-86 as Visiting
Professor courtesy my friend and famous China scholar Roderick Macfarquhar.
In 1990s after we ushered in reforms, Samuelson wrote me a letter expressing
happiness that “at last, India has discovered economic growth”.
Once at a get together I called him my guru and explained the gurukul system
of our rishis. He said “Ah ! That is what the US needs”. But Samuelson was
already a rishi in the way he treated his chosen students and saw them
through difficulties. Thus, I shall remember always as that I was once
Samuelson’s chosen student among the many he nurtured in his glorious life.
(PUBLISHED IN HINDU ON 23.12.2009)
Prof. Samuelson: guru extraordinaire
Subramanian Swamy
A chosen student among the many Prof. Paul Samuelson nurtured recalls the
teacher’s contributions.
If anyone can be called the father of modern analytical and scientific
economics, it is Paul A. Samuelson, who passed away on December 13 at 94.
Anyone who has read economics, even in the most fleeting way, cannot but
recognise his perceptive undergraduate economics textbook. Think of
analytical economics, and you think of Samuelson.
When I saw him last when he was 92, he was driving his car near his home in
Belmont, Massachusetts — a small elite town in the vicinity of Cambridge
which is home to Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology — and as alert as ever. He stopped upon seeing me on the sidewalk,
pulled over and chatted about how I was. Since 2000 I have been going back
each summer to Harvard to teach two courses in economics, and I had been
meeting him over a one-to-one lunch at his favourite restaurant at Harvard
Square. That year I had not yet called him, and he was disapproving.
Whenever I met him I was just his student, which I had been in 1962-63. At
every meeting with him I had to answer his rapid-fire questions about a
series of subjects, and even share delightful gossip. On that summer’s day at
Belmont it was no different.
Later I had become his co-author on the Theory of Index Numbers, published
our research in the American Economic Review (1974) and the Royal Economic
Society’s Economic Journal (1984), but I was still treated as his student, to
be cared for, and questioned.
Samuelson’s main contribution to modern economics was the use of advanced
calculus to show that economics could be structured on clearly stated or
observable behavioural assumptions or axioms or objectives, and then by
mathematical deduction deriving economic laws that could be tested on
real-life statistical data. He thus made economics a subject of scientific
inquiry to be truly called a science, in the sense that propositions in
economics could be ‘proved’ with proof, just as theorems in mathematics could
be. Mathematical logic and rigour was all; little else mattered. Gone, thus,
were the days of John Maynard Keynes’ “Shakespearean” economics and John
Kenneth Galbraith’s art of expression. Felicity in English no more mattered;
mathematical methods took its place. Samuelson globalised economics by
enabling scholars who knew little English to join in international discourse
and collaboration in research and teaching. Economics thus exploded on to the
international scene, and became fashionable.
Worked in two dimensions
Samuelson worked in two dimensions throughout his life. In one, he spoke in
homely English about the most complicated economic issues. He thus authored
one of the most widely used college textbooks in the history of American
education. The book, titled Economics, first published in 1948, was the
globe’s best-selling textbook for nearly 30 years. Translated into 20
languages and updated periodically, it is selling over 50,000 copies a year
in its 19th edition half a century after it first appeared.
His second dimension was of mathematical rigour that began with his Harvard
Ph.D. thesis-turned-book titled The Foundations of Economic Analysis. This is
a gold mine for research even today. When he defended his thesis before a
committee of three Harvard Professors, the story goes that the chairman,
Professor Joseph A. Schumpeter, asked his two fellow-members after the viva
voce: “Gentlemen, have we passed?”
Between the two books, Samuelson redefined modern economics and made it
popular, yet a science. For that he became the first American to win the then
newly instituted Nobel prize for economics.
Paul Antony Samuelson was born on May 15, 1915 in Gary, Indiana. After
receiving his bachelor’s from Chicago in 1935, he went to Harvard. He earned
his master’s from Harvard in 1936 and a Ph.D. formally in 1941. He wrote his
thesis in 1937.
In 1940, Harvard offered him an instructorship (the Harvard equivalent of Assistant
Professor, which in turn equalled the position of an Associate Professor
elsewhere), which he accepted. But a month later the MIT invited him to
become an Assistant Professor, that is, the same as Harvard’s Instructor. But
jealousy and, some suspect, the anti-Semitism of the late-1930s made Harvard
deny him a promotion, even though he had by then developed an international
following.
Fresh from India with a B.A. Honours in Mathematics and a Master’s in
Mathematical Statistics, I first met Samuelson in his office in September
1962 wanting to be his student, cross-registering in the most advanced
mathematical economics course of the MIT. I had arrived in Cambridge on a
Harvard scholarship for a Ph.D. Samuelson selected each year only 20
students, out of about 200 who applied, expecting to groom them as scholars.
I wondered whether I would be chosen. I was.
Once while lecturing on the theory of consumer behaviour in class, Samuelson
wrote on the blackboard a series of equations to derive a theorem. As a student
I raised my hand from my desk and said: “You have one equation wrong, so you
will not be able to prove the theorem.” There was stunned silence. Samuelson
walked to my seat and glowered: “What did you say?” I held my ground and
offered to rectify what was a small careless mistake which all geniuses
commit on the blackboard in class. He made me go to the blackboard and write
out the correct equation — which I did. Then, sternly he said: “See me after
class.” My classmates thought that was the end of me. One asked: “Have you
got your return ticket to India?”
But it was, instead, the beginning of me — and of a relationship. When I saw
him after class, he said: “I think you and I should write a joint paper some
day.” This we did 10 years later, but he me helped in the interim on a number
of papers published in my own name, and thanked me in footnotes of his
published papers for having corrected him or given him leads. He, and my
thesis adviser Simon Kuznets at Harvard, launched my career. I became a Teaching
Fellow as a student, an Instructor soon after, obtaining a Ph.D in the
shortest possible time of 18 months, and an Assistant Professor, all at
Harvard.
I eventually joined politics because my career was blocked in India. I
continued to return to Harvard to teach, and got nothing but warmth and
welcome from Samuelson each time. During the Emergency, Henry Rosovsky, the
Harvard economist, became the Dean and appointed me Visiting Professor.
Indira Gandhi sent an emissary to him to cancel my appointment. But Henry was
no pushover. By now Samuelson was convinced that I had responded to a higher
call. He encouraged me to fight on. He wrote in Newsweek against the
Emergency and even signed a petition along with other Nobel laureates to the
U.S. President condemning the jailing without trial of 140,000 persons.
Samuelson remained sympathetic from then on to my choice of a political
career over academics. Once I called him my guru and explained the gurukul
system of the Indian rishis. He said: “Ah! That’s what the U.S. needs.”
Samuelson was already a rishi in the way he treated his chosen students. I
shall remember always that I was once his chosen student among the many he
nurtured.
(Dr. Subramanian Swamy is a former Union Minister who is the president of the
Janata Party.)
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