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A 'giant of record'.

Article Excerpt
1. Introduction--The Qualities of a Top Economics Department

Just as cats can look at kings, I can try to evaluate Paul Samuelson's achievements over a 90-year lifetime.

My own connection to Samuelson begins with my selection of graduate schools some fifty years ago, including ignoring the sound advice offered by Alvin Hansen, quite probably Paul's true mentor at Harvard. In a labor economics seminar at the University of Wisconsin during the 1910s, Hansen had submitted a term paper written in longhand to John R. Commons, who was assisted by my father Selig Perlman, who became a longtime professor of labor economics at Wisconsin. It was Perlman who worked his way through Hansen's handwriting and went to Commons, saying this is not only the best paper submitted, but one which you 'must read.' Thereafter Hansen's reputation was made, and in time he was recommended for three positions--Brown, the University of Minnesota and finally at Harvard where he relocated in 1937 and remained active on the faculty until 1962 and then as an emeritus until his death in 1975.

Just before the 1946 winter break my father advised me to tour several universities to see where I should apply to take a doctorate. I recall conversations at Harvard with Sumner Slichter (in earlier days my father's fellow graduate student) and then with Alvin Hansen. Slichter, to whom I eventually dedicated a book, assumed that anyone in his right mind would try to get into Harvard's program. Thus it came as a distinct surprise to me when Hansen, after recalling how pivotal Selig had been in his own career, told me that if I were intent on coming to Cambridge, the place to go was MIT. Why? Because Samuelson was not only there, but also because he was building a 'greater' faculty than Harvard's. Here I must admit I erred; I did not take Hansen's advice, nor Slichter's, nor a good many other scholars'.

What matters here is why Hansen thought so much of MIT. Years later (in the 1980s) when I was long the senior professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh, our Provost came to me and asked what it would take to improve Pitt's economics department. I told him that I thought on a scale of 10, Pitt had, at best, a grade five department, and with a fair sum of money I believed it could possibly be raised to a good grade three department. "No better than that?" was his reaction. My reply was that in my opinion there were only three first-rate departments of economics at that time in the United States: MIT, Chicago, and Stanford. They were first-rate because they had recruited brilliant graduate students (generally on some form of fellowship), brilliant faculty members, and most to the point, the two really worked together. Many schools had the first two, but it was the lack of close faculty interaction and true interest in their students that marked them as simply second-rate. What Samuelson was bringing to MIT, Hansen opined, was not only his own brilliance but a wonderful openness with excellent colleagues and students. (Indeed, it was my own worries about my skills not being what Samuelson would think brilliant that forced my choice against going to Cambridge.) But I have never forgotten that 30 minute conversation with Hansen.

I reminded him of it when my wife, Naomi, and I met the Hansens again in 1958 while touring Japan. Their cicerone was Shigeto Tsuru, not only a long-time close friend of Samuelson's, but the one who translated repeatedly the various editions of Samuelson's Principles into Japanese. Shigeto introduced himself to my wife and me by noting that he had once been my father's student at Wisconsin, and that Samuelson and he were both Hansen proteges. (1) From that beginning a long and for me certainly a very precious friendship developed, furthered by the semester that Shigeto and his wife, Masako (the great-grandchild of the Goro Kiddo), later spent at Hopkins where I was then teaching. A clear byproduct of my knowing Shigeto was a tremendous derived appreciation of Samuelson. It is from Tsuru that I gained some further insight into that wonderful Samuelson-openness which Hansen had so appreciated.

So much by way of introduction. Even so, it marks the first part of Samuelson's tremendous heritage--he built a first-rate economics department not only by being seemingly effortlessly brilliant, but by being willing to work with brilliant colleagues like Tsuru and many unusual students of whom George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Joseph Stiglitz are exemplar. (2)

The remainder of this essay has two substantive parts. The first describes the importance attached to the 1947 Foundations--what...

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