Marion Crawford

Marion Estelle Crawford was the third of three children of Will and Edna Crawford. Her father was born on a farm in Wisconsin, and after a brief spell teaching, he become a bank teller.

Friends consistently remembered Marion as being simple and straightfor­ward, untouched by the success Paul was later to achieve.⁶⁸ Lively and with a good sense of humor, calm and tolerant, she hated cant and was modest and, in Paul's mind, extraordinarily unambitious. She was athletic, and applied herself to tennis, the sport for which Paul was an enthusiast, learning to play well. Being good at mathematics, she thought at one point of studying physics. Marion provided the emotional security Paul needed. Though he dutifully visited his parents, on vacations it was her parents' home in Berlin where they spent more time, despite her parents' initial concerns about his being Jewish. Marion did not share her parents' prejudices—to the contrary, her mother's sense of social superiority was so strong that she reacted against it. Paul thought that this experience made her more aware than he was of the prejudice that surrounded them at Harvard and the merits of moving to MIT.

Marion may have been lonely at first. Though Harvard accepted women, they were taught separately and subject to different regulations, such as having to leave the stacks in the Widener Library by 6 p.m., whereas men could stay there till 10 p.m. In addition she did not fit in socially; she was a Midwesterner who had never been out of the country, but had to listen to the other girls talking about their visits to France and Austria. She had friends in Rosemary and Phil, but became more distant when Phil became more conservative, something that clearly mattered to her. Then late in 1935, Tsuru introduced Paul and Marion to each other at Mary's Coffee shop on Church Street, just off Harvard Square, which Paul remembered as having good brownies. Samuelson summarized the way their relationship developed:

It was a case of “liking at first sight.” Her quiet serenity was light years away from flirtatious coquetry. I was no accomplished Casanova.

Among the graduate school nerds, all that distinguished me was my superior Chicago preparation in economics and my brash ability to correct our teachers' quota of mistakes.

A couple of times we walked together along the Charles River on nice autumn days, chatting about how different New England folks were from Wisconsin and other midwesterners, and how unintelli­gible at first seemed the lecture dialects of Professors Schumpeter and Leontief.

Near where the Cambridge Tennis Club is, there used to be a little ice cream shop. We sat down for chocolate sundaes, then only 20^“ each. What then happened astonished Marion completely, and sur­prised me even more. It was so uncharacteristic.

Neither of us said anything. It had never happened. But liking at first sight had turned into love at second sight.

With increasing frequency we met for lunch, or for a movie or con­cert. Or just for walks in the incessant Boston rains. She would walk me back from the Radcliffe Quadrangle to the Cambridge Common. And I would trudge back all the way across the river to my sumptu­ous B-School suite, whistling Rogers & Hart or Gershwin all the way.

We became inseparable.⁷⁰

Though still an undergraduate, Marion became part of the group of gradu­ate students who socialized with Paul and Tsuru, and her relationship with Paul became increasingly close. Paul remembered having spent most of their days together, separating only at night when they retired to their respective residences. The following academic year, 1936—37, was Marion's final year at Radcliffe, during which Paul became one of the most regular male visitors to the university residence in which she lived. In addition to her required courses and writing her thesis, she audited Schumpeter's graduate theory course, which Paul had taken the year before.⁷¹ Her honors thesis bore the title “A Mathematical Reconstruction of the Elasticity of Substitution” and was submitted in April 1937.⁷² The elasticity of substitution was a concept used to measure the ease with which two factors of production (usually capital and labor) could be substituted for each other. It was first defined in a book, The Theory of Wages (1932), by the young British economist John Hicks, who used it to show how this parameter—seemingly a technical concept rooted in technology—determined how the distribution of income between wages and profits would change when the supply of either labor or capital changed.

Rather the “National Dividend” is thought of as being produced by heterogeneous productive agencies classified into two categories by dichotomy.[^w] In some sense the “National Dividend” must be thought of as a composite bundle of a great many different consumer's goods; but in just what sense Mr. Hicks does not think necessary to specify. It is in this omission, “in this implicit theorizing,” that we may find the clue to all the misunderstanding which later arose, and which, as I shall later argue, vitiates Mr. Hicks' analysis.⁷⁴

She proceeded to challenge the idea that it was meaningful to speak of a “production function” linking “National Dividend” to inputs of aggregate capital and aggregate labor.

But if we wish to consider an economic system of any complexity at all, where there is more than one commodity and more than two fac­tors of production, then the meaning of the “National Dividend” is extremely doubtful, as is even more so any functional relationship between it and two composite bundles of productive agencies, how­ever demarcated.⁷⁵

What Marion is doing here is challenging the idea that there is an exact parallel between the behavior of an individual company and the behavior of the nation as a whole.

w. National Dividend is what is now called national income or national product, the most common measure of which is gross national product (GNP). The phrase “implicit theorizing,” used in the last sentence, comes from Leontief 1937. and was capable of criticizing some of the latest developments in economic theory, but it also shows that she had a level of competence in mathematics that placed her ahead of most economists of the day. Given that they were so close, it is inconceivable that she did not discuss these things with Paul, who may have suggested certain ideas to her, but it shows conclusively that she was able to engage closely with his work in economics.

Marion stayed on at Harvard after earning her AB, studying for an MA in economics, presumably taking many of the courses attended two years earlier by Paul, and then working as an assistant to Schumpeter and Seymour Harris. She was highly regarded. Wilson described her as “a grand economist,” and Schumpeter apparently rated her as highly as Paul.⁷⁶ She assisted Harris in writ­ing a book on the Social Security system, in the preface to which he wrote:

Mrs. Samuelson contributed research assistance and editorial help. More than to anyone else, the author is indebted to her. Her clear, mathemati­cally trained mind and her faculty of lucid expression have left their impression on this manuscript. Numerous pages are, indeed, her work.⁷⁷

This acknowledgment went far beyond anything dictated by politeness. Paul's view was that she was smarter than Harris and kept taking things out of the book.

They were married in July 1938, in Cambridge. The match was, at least initially, welcomed by neither of their families, though for Marion's family he was the lesser of two evils, in that a Jew was less unwelcome than a Japanese. Paul wrote:

Then too, differences in religious heritage had to be faced. I was the child of non-observing Jews.

The marriage of a Jew to a non-Jew also caused a stir in Harvard, though Paul explained that a further factor behind the reactions of the older generation was the economic situation.

In those depression days 20-year-old academics didn't marry. Most of our Harvard professors had only one or two children or were child­less. Jobs were short in those pre-war days of recovery from the Great Depression.

Schumpeter had the further objection that it was inappropriate for scholars to marry in what he considered the “sacred decade” of their twenties, though it has also been suggested that Schumpeter had been attracted to Marion.⁷⁹ Paul described him as being “very soft on her” for “he liked Aryan types” and she was tall and blonde.⁸⁰ However, by then Paul had a junior fellowship (see chapter 10 this volume), which gave him the income and security he needed. Their friends had no qualms about the event.

The die was cast. On July 2, 1938 (at the bottom of the 1937-9 reces­sion) we were married by the Cambridge Clerk across the street from Central square post office. The wild wedding party that evening in our studio Ware Street apartment spawned subsequent marriages by Abram and Rita Bergson and Shigeto and Masako Tsuru. In return for Shigeto's being our go-between, we assisted him in choosing Masako.⁸¹

The apartment into which they moved, on Ware Street, adjacent to Harvard Yard, became a place where the group of young economists held parties. One friend, Bob Bishop (later to be a colleague at MIT), recalled regular evenings when six or more of them played poker for very small stakes. This was an activity for which Marion left Paul behind, for according to Bishop, “it was usually a matter of whether Marion's winnings were enough to offset Paul's losses.”⁸² On occasion a group of around fifteen couples rented a hall, where they organized dances to recorded music.

Marion was very important to Paul. Not only did she provide him with the emotional security he needed, eventually taking responsibility for their growing family, but also in the early years of their relationship they worked together. Paul credits her with stimulating his interest in Social Security. One of his most important publications, on the theory of international trade, was a subject about which she had published an article and was written with her assistance. They also wrote a joint paper on population growth that was not published. Her undergraduate thesis shows that, though her mathemat­ics probably did not keep up with Paul's, she knew enough to engage with what Paul was doing, and it touched on several problems that he would later write about himself. Like Paul, she was a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt.