Encountering Social Science
From Hyde Park School, Samuelson went, almost inevitably, to the University of Chicago, which was to play an important role not just in his career but also in his self-image as an economist.
It was as an undergraduate there that he made the decision to become an economist and to approach the subject using mathematics. He also credits the University of Chicago with having introduced him to the natural sciences—subjects that he had studied only briefly at Hyde Park School. However, the University of Chicago had an importance beyond that, for he argued repeatedly it had trained him in the traditional economics that was to be undermined by the Keynesian revolution into which he was swept up a few years later, at Harvard. He claimed to have known, from the inside, what it was like to be as a “classical” monetary theorist; though he had turned away from the ideas taken up by Milton Friedman, his fellow columnist at Newsweek in the 1960s and 1970s, he understood the tradition in which Friedman’s thinking was rooted.In the 1930s, the University of Chicago was one of the main centers of social science research in the United States, and in the curriculum Samuelson followed for the first two years, economics was taught as part of the social sciences. The economic system was presented not as something distinct—not as being about an isolated, abstract entity called “the economy”—but as part of a reflection on the workings of society as a whole. He was introduced to an anthropological perspective on human existence. Though this was not something to which Samuelson drew attention, his training in the social sciences, which was unlike that received by most modern economists, helps explain the way he was to tackle economic problems. It was an important part of his intellectual development. We can be sure that he took non-economics seriously because, aside from his getting straight As and receiving a prize in political science, his commitment to studying economics came late—at one point he even thought of becoming a sociologist.
It never occurred to Samuelson to attend any university other than Chicago, even if his family's finances had allowed it, and they probably did not. He lived at home throughout his undergraduate career, Hyde Park School had a scheme that allowed its high-performing students to move on to the University of Chicago in the middle of their senior year. His first class was thus in January 1932, an event so significant that he repeatedly described it as a second birth—as a new stage in his life. “At 8:00 a.m. on a cold 1932 January 2nd I entered into heaven. My heaven. I walked into a Chicago lecture room. And I stepped out a different person.”1 The professor whose lecture had this effect was not an economist, but a sociologist, Louis Wirth, lecturing on Malthus's theory of population growth.a The topic appealed to Samuelson because it involved a good story and enabled him to use his high school mathematics. Unlike many who took up economics during the Great Depression, he did not claim to have been motivated by a desire to understand or solve the problem of unemployment.
Starting his university career with a lecture that showed him how he could apply mathematics to social problems was one of the benefits Samuelson attributed to his mid-year start. The timing of his arrival and his consciousness of the fact that he would be competing with students who had started four months earlier had the further benefit of transforming him from being an underachiever into someone who worked hard and sought to get as much out of his courses as he could. Commuting from home and missing out on the social events at the beginning of the academic year that would have introduced him to his contemporaries did not matter.
Samuelson arrived in the first year of the new undergraduate program instituted by Robert Hutchins, the university's president since 1929. It required all students to take a multidisciplinary program for the first two years of their BA degree.
Samuelson had no great enthusiasm for thea. Thomas Robert Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle ofPopulation, first published in
1798, had developed the theory in which population has a tendency to expand faster than the supply of food and needs to be kept in check by various mechanisms that he classified into misery and vice. His ideas have been used to explain the problems faced by poor countries. See Winch 2013.
philosophy of Mortimer Adler, which was the basis for the new curriculum, or for the Hundred Great Books program, but he was enthusiastic about the requirement that students take courses in physical science, biological science, social sciences, and the humanities. He believed he had benefited greatly from taking an excellent course in biology and an up-to-date course in natural science, subjects he had chosen not to study in depth in high school. Many outsiders were brought in to teach, and he was able to listen to some world-famous lecturers. Hutchins had been able to achieve so much, in the depths of the Great Depression, through financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, though according to some this was at the cost of the university’s assets. However, according to Samuelson, another factor behind Chicago's greatness in this period was that though Chicago suffered, like all universities, from anti-Semitism, it was far less marked there than elsewhere. The result was that it placed Chicago in what Samuelson described as a monopoly position in relation to the hiring of Jews, a position it lost when anti-Semitism declined elsewhere. Samuelson illustrated the position at Chicago with the story of a sports coach who immediately fired one of his assistants who had made an anti-Semitic remark.2
In my undergraduate time, a Chicago coach was reported to have said aloud (there is no other way to say something): “There are getting to be too many Jews around here.” When this was reported to the headcoach Amos Alonzo Stagg, Stagg called in the accused.
“Did you say that?” “Yes, in a thoughtless moment I did say those words.” “Well then, as of this hour, you are fired. Collect your pay and sweat garb and go.”3The significance of this incident lay in its rarity. Another incident that he learned from a classmate, Jacob Mosak, testified to the openness of their teachers.
In the 1920s when Frank Knight, Jacob Viner and other Chicago economists decided to recruit Henry Schultz, protege of H. L. Moore and an early econometrician, they were told: “But President Max Mason does not like Jews.” “Well, let him veto the appointment then. We think he’s the best man for the post.”
There was anti-Semitism in Chicago, but Samuelson clearly did not consider it a major issue in that most non-Jews were not anti-Semitic “in any significant sense. ”4
However, the main benefit Samuelson believed he derived from his late start was that, while he got to take Hutchins’s new interdisciplinary program, he had missed what he dismissively called “economics for poets” taught by Harry Gideonse in the first semester and was required to take a second-semester beginners’ economics course intended for juniors and seniors who had not experienced the new regime. Samuelson thus experienced both the new interdisciplinary program and a traditional introductory economics course.