Chicago to MIT

Samuelson could reflect fondly on his childhood. He recalled the drugstore in which his father taught him how to do arithmetic, an experience that was clearly important to him. His mother was a more distant figure, perhaps because given the conventions of the day, according to which she would have been the prime caregiver, he blamed her for being sent off to the farm for long spells.

When Paul grew close to Marion, her hometown of Berlin, Wisconsin, became another home, at least during the vacations. He still visited his par­ents in Chicago, but this was out of duty. At some point after his father's death in August 1939, his mother moved to San Francisco, and in 1950 she remarried; a year later, he had still not met her new husband, despite having made trips westward. Harold and Robert lived close by and looked after their mother.

Despite being a commuter, Samuelson became immersed in the University of Chicago when he arrived in January 1932, describing his arrival there as a second birth. It is hard to resist reading this as implying a commitment to a new home that went beyond the purely intellectual stimulation of the Malthusian theory of population growth he encountered in the first lecture he attended.

neoclassical economist, retained traces of the more pluralist intellectual environment in which he had been trained.

and wrote of Knight as having been his “idol.” He was taken by their icono­clasm. Their political views were also shared by Harry Gideonse, another of Samuelson’s teachers who was important to him.^b He was personally close to the more liberal Paul Douglas, but if Douglas’s political views tempted him, Samuelson had the example of Director, who moved rapidly away from Douglas into Knight’s circle.

Despite talking of a second birth when he arrived in Chicago, his com­mitment to economics did not happen for an additional two years. Hutchins’s Chicago required that all students take a broad program covering the natural and social sciences and the humanities. Samuelson had no regrets about this program, even though it meant that specialization was delayed. The first prize he won was not for economics but for an essay on civil government— something that would have been very significant for him, given his interest in a diplomatic career. When he did specialize, it was in the social sciences, and in his junior year his courses included anthropology, sociology, and polit­ical science. His commitment to economics came in the middle of his junior year, seemingly as a result of Director’s course on labor problems, an essay written for Director being not just one that he preserved but also one he later included in his publications list.

Many of those who entered economics during the Great Depression (such as James Tobin) were motivated by a desire to do something about the prob­lem of unemployment.

Though he may not, at that stage, have thought of himself as a “math­ematical economist,” this was the path on which he had embarked, and there

b. Gideonse, Knight, Director, and Stigler all attended the initial meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947.

seems little reason to doubt his claim that he took more mathematics courses than any previous economics major had done. When, at Harvard, he began to espouse operationalism and the idea that meaningful theorems were test­able, he was moving away from Knight's position. However, his economics remained detached from any significant political involvement, which came only after he started working with Hansen. When, during the Second World War, Samuelson became identified publicly with a clear political stance, the gulf between his views and Knight's became even greater.

Had he been able to do so, Samuelson would have remained at Chicago, but the terms of the SSRC scholarship that Viner was instrumental in obtaining for him forced him to leave his newfound home. He chose Harvard, though initially without any expectation that he would settle there.

The clearest sign of his acceptance into Harvard, temporarily at least, was becoming the first economist to be appointed a junior fellow. He had joined an elite whose reach extended beyond the confines of economics and whose paths would repeatedly cross his own. His contemporaries included historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, chemists E. Bright Wilson and Bob Woodward, physicist Ivan Getting, and though he had recently ceased to be a junior fellow, philosopher Willard Quine. The freedom and resources given by the Society of Fellows lie behind the stream of articles on which his later reputation was to rest.

Unlike the decision to leave Chicago, leaving Harvard for MIT in October 1940 was a choice Samuelson was not forced to make. He took up an instruc­torship at Harvard and was assured that it would likely be renewed, but MIT offered him a position with higher status and better salary and conditions. The MIT department, devoted to service teaching for scientists and engi­neers, was no match for Harvard's, but it was only two miles away and he could remain in touch with his friends and colleagues. He continued to live a stone's throw from Harvard Yard. There was also the question of whether his Jewish ancestry might prove a barrier in the undoubtedly anti-Semitic envi­ronment of Harvard. Given the strong support he received from Schumpeter and the esteem in which many other faculty members held him, Samuelson had been able to turn a blind eye to this. He had been accepted into the Society of Fellows and though some, such as Department Chair Harold Burbank, might be less supportive, Samuelson could attribute their apparent antipathy to political differences, or to doubts about someone cleverer than they were, rather than anti-Semitism.

His colleagues at MIT welcomed him: to have recruited him was, for them, a significant coup, and though he might be no more than an assistant professor, he was well supported. They might be doing service teaching, but it was a close-knit department with a common purpose that strength­ened as the war developed. He got on well with Ralph Freeman and Rupert Maclaurin, and was very close to Harold Freeman. Shortly after his arrival, MIT instituted a PhD program in economics, and during the 1940s further appointments were made, including many scholars of Jewish background whom Harvard did not want, that expanded the department. He was rap­idly promoted, and when the chance came to return to Chicago, much closer to Wisconsin and his own family, the attractions of MIT had grown too strong.

As with his move to MIT, it was Marion who could see most clearly that he would be happier remaining where he was, with their growing family and a house in the suburbs. Economics at MIT might still be tiny in relation to places such as Chicago or Harvard, and they remained economists in an engineering school, but with the wartime development of enormous research laboratories, of which the Radiation Laboratory was one, postwar MIT had acquired great prestige as one of the preeminent locations of American “big” science. It might take time for economists in other universities to appreciate this—the inquiries he continued to receive about his interest in a position elsewhere clearly reflected the perception that an economist at MIT must be hoping for an opening elsewhere—but for someone committed to the idea that economics was a science, it was a natural place to be.

MIT was near Harvard, which conferred advantages in terms of course availability and research collaboration. But there was also intense competi­tiveness, with the result that when MIT acquired someone who was clearly better than his counterparts at Harvard (in this period most academics were male), such as Norbert Wiener or Noam Chomsky, that person would be celebrated as a star. By 1948, after the enthusiastic reception of Foundations of Economic Analysis and the runaway success of Economics: An Introductory Analysis, Samuelson was in such a position. Compton's successor as MIT president, James Killian, came to view him as the reason for the success of

MIT's economics department: he was the magnet who pulled other good economists toward MIT. It was a role he was very comfortable with.