PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To economists OF a certain age, a biography of Paul Samuelson requires no justification. He was a towering figure in economics, but little is known about him other than his publications and the reputation of his department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
As with most economists, his life is, for the most part, of little interest, containing few of the dramatic events and none of the scandals that hold the attention of the nonspecialist reader. Unlike, for example, the scientists J. D. Bernal or J. Robert Oppenheimer, there is no life of action, intrigue, communism, or sexual exploits to entertain. He married young and his marriage lasted until his wife's death. Apart from government consultancy and joining a scientific laboratory for a period during the Second World War, Samuelson sat in his office doing economics, went to seminars and conferences discussing economics, advised politicians about economics, wrote about economics in the press, and even sat at home with his children on his lap, thinking about economics. He could have fun outside economics (the book mentions some occasions remembered by his many friends) and he was a keen tennis player, but economics was never far from his mind. His life is of interest only insofar as it is relevant to his economics. There is thus ample reason for this being an intellectual biography—the story of the evolution of his ideas—rather than a full life.Moreover, even if it were desirable to write a detailed account of Samuelson's life, it would not be possible. Any biography is constrained by the source material. Few subjects leave materials that are sufficient to answer every question the biographer wants to ask of them, and Samuelson is no exception. His papers, filling 155 boxes, with over 70 boxes of correspondence alone, are extensive but not comprehensive. His activities as a student are not documented in detail: his correspondence indicates that he kept his student notes at least until the late 1940s, but they appear not to have survived.
The boxes of unpublished papers include some student essays, but these can surely be only a fraction of the ones he wrote. His transcripts indicate only those courses he attended for credit, leaving us in ignorance of the many that he audited. No records survive of how and where he met many of the teachers he claims to have known well. Information is also patchy on the courses he taught. Such student notes as exist suggest that in the early years he told students what to read and that written reading lists may never have existed. The report written at the end of his first externally funded research project is missing, making it necessary to speculate as to what it achieved (or, much more likely, failed to achieve). Records of his submissions to journals, and hence what referees thought of them, are incomplete because neither he nor the journal offices have kept records. The publication history of Foundations of Economic Analysis is well documented in the archives of Harvard University Press, but the early history of his textbook is less clear: McGraw-Hill’s archives, if they still exist, have not been located. There is also the problem of no written traces of most of his interactions with friends, teachers, and colleagues. He left nothing resembling an engagement diary.Samuelson was forever telling stories about his life, frequently bringing them into accounts of people he had known, but these stories were not systematic. They focused on the events that supported his self-image as a selftaught prodigy who fell in love with economics at first sight. He enjoyed reminiscing about the past, especially the golden years of Harvard economics, and celebrating the achievements of his teachers and friends, often hailed as if they were Greek or Roman gods. Later in his life, Samuelson embarked on an autobiography but abandoned it, writing about little beyond his early life. Autobiography loses interest, he wrote, when success arrives, a point he dated to 1940, when he was just twenty-five years old.
Even his account of his Harvard years did little more than reproduce material from an article he had previously published. These recollections are invaluable in filling out the archival record, but they need to be treated with caution. He was generally reluctant to provide details beyond what was needed to back up the claims he wanted to make. For example, when asked about his mathematical education, he listed areas of mathematics on which he had attended lectures but was deliberately vague on who had taught him and when. As far as he was concerned, the questioner appeared to be doubting his claim to be essentially self-taught in mathematics. Details have to be teased out of a variety of sources, and even then they are incomplete.There is the further problem that there are places where Samuelson was clearly saying things for effect and the absence of alternative sources makes it impossible to disentangle the facts from the points he wanted to make. His account of his first encounter with Harold Burbank was intended to make the point that he was bold and confident, standing up to an anti-Semitic department chair whom he despised. Some readers will wonder whether his account of this meeting is plausible. If Samuelson behaved as he did, then surely he would have given an anti-Semite ample excuse to refuse him admission to Harvard. In many cases I have simply reported Samuelson’s accounts, leaving it to the reader to decide for herself whether they should be read as factual reports of events or as autobiographical accounts that reveal Samuelson’s personality and attitudes without necessarily telling us what an impartial spectator would have seen. This procedure does mean that in a few places this biography becomes autobiography; but these instances of autobiography are no more than glimpses, and in the book as a whole they are placed within a context that is not one provided by its subject.
Though structured around the life of one economist, the story told here offers an account of the overlapping communities of economists to which Samuelson belonged: the University of Chicago, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and wartime Washington.
Parts of this book are therefore, by design, as much a picture of the people with whom he interacted and the ideas to which he was been exposed as of Samuelson himself. The reason for this emphasis is to explain the context in which Samuelson developed his ideas, revealing connections with the past that might otherwise not be apparent to anyone viewing Samuelson’s writings in the context of what happened subsequently. The work of economists such as Aaron Director, Frank Knight, Jacob Viner, Paul Douglas, Leonard Crum, Joseph Schumpeter, Edwin Bidwell Wilson, Gottfried Haberler, Wassily Leontief, Alvin Hansen and Lawrence Klein is important both to understand Samuelson and to understand the transition of which he was a part. Because some of them are little known, or known by their later work, their ideas have to be described in some detail.This emphasis is central to my reading of Samuelson as a transitional figure linking what has been described as a pluralist interwar economics with the narrower, more theoretical, mathematical, “neoclassical” economics that emerged after the Second World War. It is also important in providing a picture of that transition, which can be seen by comparing Samuelson’s own approach to economics with that of his teachers. Though he was not single-handedly responsible for the transition—it would be absurd to suggest that—his work and that of the growing community of his friends and colleagues embodied the new approach to economics. The story of an individual that I present here is at the same time a story of a succession of overlapping communities of economists in a period that saw dramatic changes in the subject.
Samuelson’s biography poses organizational problems, for there is more than one thread running through his intellectual development and these different threads overlap. There are some clear chronological breaks—notably his moves from Chicago to Harvard in 1935 and from Harvard to MIT in 1940 (the latter was a less decisive break; Chicago to Cambridge is nearly a thousand miles; from Harvard to MIT is close to two miles and he continued to live very close to Harvard).
For his student years, the rhythm of the academic year makes it possible to adopt a roughly chronological structure, but once he moved to MIT and into government service, this rhythm disappears. It becomes necessary to depart from strict chronology in order to avoid jumping back and forth between different themes. An earlier draft was strictly chronological, and though it may have shown how Samuelson juggled many activities simultaneously, it was baffling for readers trying to follow the development of his ideas.Samuelson’s personality and the social networks in which he became involved are essential to understanding his intellectual development and the position he came to hold within American economics. However, for all that he liked to be the center of attention—and he did—he was private. It is impossible to reconstruct a day-to-day account of his activities and his interactions with family and friends. Occasional glimpses are given in his correspondence, and these are brought into the narrative as much as possible, but no more than this is attempted. The place where this probably matters most is his relationship with Marion Crawford, whom he married in 1938. Such evidence as there is suggests that her role in his early work was substantial and may have gone beyond what it has been possible to document here.
Many economists reading this book will expect me to relate Samuelson’s early work to what he did later in his life. Clearly, the book would never have been written had he not gone on to become a significant figure in the profession, and it is impossible to forget what happened to him after 1948. However, I have tried as far as possible to put aside what I know of his subsequent career and to read as little as possible of his later writings into his early work. Given Samuelson rarely missed a chance to talk about himself or to praise his friends, this exposes me to the danger that readers who are more familiar with some of his later writings than I have chosen to be will find in them pieces of evidence that I would have taken into account had I known about them.
However, though I have drawn upon his later writings where I knew there was material relevant to his early life, I decided that this was a price worth paying. Samuelson once praised a biography of Abraham Lincoln because it was written as if you did not know what was going to happen next; I have tried to do something similar.Even if Samuelson was, as he claimed, born to be an economist, quickly falling in love with the subject, the mature economist did not emerge fully formed. The young Samuelson was not a pure “neoclassical” economist, but combined mathematical theory with ideas thoroughly rooted in the more pragmatic, empirical, less abstract economics of the interwar period, much of which goes under the label of “institutionalism.” It is possible that I have gone too far in trying to recover someone whose economics was less “orthodox” than it is generally assumed to be, but I see this as a risk that must be taken in order to allow the young Samuelson to be heard over the mature Samuelson who is well known today. Where Samuelson did change his mind significantly after 1948, that is a matter for the next volume.
I would never have embarked on this project without the support of the Leverhulme Trust, which awarded me a Major Research Fellowship, freeing me from all teaching and administrative duties, for the three academic years from 2011 through 2014. I am grateful both to the Trust and to colleagues in the Department of Economics at the University of Birmingham for their support. After that, my main debt is to the archivists at Duke University—Will Hansen, Elizabeth Dunn, and their colleagues—who have been helpful beyond the call of duty as I have worked my way systematically through Samuelson’s papers and materials from many of the other collections housed there. I have also spent much time in the archives of Harvard University and MIT, where the staff have enabled me to access invaluable materials. I also wish to thank the archivists at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) (College Park, Maryland, and Waltham, Massachusetts), Yale University, Cornell University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Columbia University. Michael Aronson assisted me with access to papers archived at Harvard University Press. Assistance in obtaining archival materials has also been provided by Olav Bjerkholt, Juan Carvajalino, Beatrice Cherrier, Bud Collier, Luca Fiorito, David Laidler, David Levy, David Mitch, Tamotsu Nishizawa, Maxime Demarais-Tremblay, and Donald Winch. Andrew and Reiko Fry translated relevant parts of Tsuru’s autobiography from Japanese.
I am also greatly indebted to some of those closest to Samuelson. At the start of the project, Robert Solow was generous with his time and since then has read and offered advice on many chapters. I also benefited from conversations with Robert Bishop, Peter Diamond, and James Poterba and from email exchanges with Kenneth Arrow, William Baumol, Henry Manne, Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman. I owe Janice Murray an enormous debt both for her assistance and for her work in organizing Samuelson’s papers before they were archived at Duke. She has helped me correct many mistakes. Family members, notably Marnie Crawford Samuelson and Anita Summers, provided advice and information.
Steven Medema, Perry Mehrling, Mary Morgan, and Roy Weintraub were of assistance in formulating the project and supporting me in the early stages, and Roy’s organization of a conference on the history of economics at MIT brought together many people who have been helpful. Friends at the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University have been very supportive, providing a critical audience for several papers. Kevin and Catherine Hoover provided accommodation that made staying away from home to work in the archives much more congenial than it would otherwise have been, with journeys to and from the campus providing occasions for Kevin pushing me to think more carefully about some of the material I was uncovering. Kevin also read an entire draft, an onerous task given that it was much rougher than this one, pointing out countless mistakes and instances of poor writing. Beatrice Cherrier, working on the history of MIT economics, has been a continuous source of assistance, as has Yann Giraud, working on Samuelson’s textbook. Material on Samuelson’s work for the Bowman Committee and on his work with Rupert Maclaurin draws on two papers written jointly with Harro Maas. Probably the biggest debt (I qualify that only because I owe so much to others) is to Steven Medema, who read virtually every chapter soon after it was written, alerting me to problems with the writing and providing endless ideas on questions to ask. He also provided a detailed critique of the entire manuscript, correcting details, raising new questions, and prompting me to structure the material in a more comprehensible way and then provided comments on a second draft. Perry Mehrling has contributed much to my understanding of Alvin Hansen and his relationship to Samuelson, and Juan Carvajalino has shared valuable ideas on E. B. Wilson and Samuelson from his PhD thesis. Roy Weintraub has provided assistance helping me think about both mathematical economics and how to handle Samuelson’s Jewish identity. I have also benefited from comments of anonymous readers of the manuscript and from those attending seminars and conferences where material from from book has been presented. However, I have not taken all the advice I have been offered. Much as I would like to take credit for anything that is good in the book and pass the buck for anything that is not, responsibility for any errors remains my own. Last, but definitely not least, my wife Ann has had to live with my obsession with Samuelson for the past five years, and has the prospect of a few more to come.
I am grateful to Robert C. Merton for permission to quote from Samuelson’s papers; the Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, for permission to quote from the papers of Shigeto Tsuru; the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, for permission to quote from the Robert Hutchins papers; Harvard University for permission to quote from material held in the Harvard University Archives; and the MIT Archives for permission to quote from materials they hold.
The manuscript was prepared using Scrivener, which made writing the text incomparably easier than if I had been forced to use a conventional word processor. DevonThink, a database program for the Mac, was invaluable for processing the tens of thousands of photographs taken in the archives, converting each of them to a PDF, and searching them. Referencing was handled with Sente, which I used to catalog manuscripts as well as publications.