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Samuelson pro and con.

Article Excerpt
Fifty three years ago I would not have expected to be able to meet and talk with two presidents--Jimmy Carter and George Bush, in 2002; neither would I have expected to be asked to write for Paul Samuelson's 90th. But August 2005 was the 53rd anniversary of my arrival in Cambridge Mass. I applied and was accepted at MIT and at Harvard (also Carnegie, Stanford and Chicago), but Harvard offered a better fellowship net of tuition than MIT or the others, and in the previous May my wife had given birth to twins so I had to deal with economic survival, get my degree and get out of Cambridge; Paul's wife Marion had triplets, showing that Paul was more prolific on all fronts than was I. Just after my arrival in Cambridge, I remember encountering him by accident in a supermarket out on Route 2, and we exchanged stories on the joys--for us as fathers--of multiple births; the wives were not there.

Paul doesn't know it but he was an important influence on my choosing to go into economics. At Caltech as a senior (1948-9) I was enrolled in an introductory economics course; I liked it, and went to the library to see what I could discover about the subject matter of professional economics. The first book I opened was the Foundations; amazing, economics was easy, it was just like textbook physics! I also subscribed to the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and one of the first issues had a paper by Hollis Chenery on Engineering Production Functions. So economics was also just like engineering. As I would later learn these were incredibly bad first impressions: economics was not like physics, where evidence mattered; economics pretended to be like physics, but the testing standards were far weaker, although Phil Mirowski has made a career out of taking physics-envy propositions more seriously than they deserve.

Paul also influenced my decision to go to Cambridge, and he will remember why--Paul remembers everything! While I was still living in Lawrence, Kansas, he and I had some correspondence on the "pure theory of consumers' behavior," dealing with integrability and all that, and an obscure early contribution by Antonelli. He sent me a copy of the original proofs for his article in Economica on the topic and I still have, and treasure it. I knew about such obscurities as the work of Antonelli, because I had developed a taste for the history of economic thought, thanks to my mentor, Dick Howey, at the University of Kansas, from whom I learned what deep scholarship was all about--learning all the tools you needed to solve problems as you encounter them; for Dick that meant knowing mathematics, Italian, French, and German. It's called learning to learn, and they did not teach it then or now in the pretty school houses, but you can pick it up by watching a skilled scholar in action whatever his or her field. I also had seen that in spades at Caltech when I took freshman chemistry from Linus Pauling, a truly remarkable scholar and human being. Paul has had a lifelong interest in history of thought issues, and I admired it already in those days, although I am the last of a generation of economists that studied the history of its own thinking. Henceforth, economists were to be trained in getting things done for and to the world, or for/to whomever, and no one was interested any more in where the intellectual questions might have come from. But the style did not change: every paper started with a previous paper, almost never a problem of the world. That always bothered me and accounts for why I got interested in engineering and economics, in what would come to be called "experimental economics" and, for a while, in the ballistics of natural resource economics, and later in the methodology of science and why its constructs were all so wrong---I came to...

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