Paul Anthony Samuelson was born in Gary Indiana and received his doctorate at Harvard University. He was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, which was awarded to him in 1970. He was president of the Amerian Economic Association in 1961 and has been teaching economics at the Massechusetts Institute of Technology since 1940. He also won the John Bates Clark award in 1947, which is awarded for the most outstanding work by an economists under the age of forty.

Samuelson is best known for his book,"Foundations of Economic Analysis", which greatly increased the use of mathematics in economics. According to Samuelson, almost all behavior could be understood as maximizing or minimizing subject to constraint . Though Hick's also touched upon this issue, he relegated his mathematical equations to appendices. According to David Henderson, "The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics" :

"Samuelson was one of the last generalists to be incredibly productive in a number of fields in economics. He has contributed fundamental insights in comsumer theory and welfare economics, international trade, finance theory, capital theory, dynamics and general equilibrium, and macroeconomics. Swedish economist Bertil Ohlin had argued that international trade would tend to equalize the price of factors of production. ..Samuelson, using mathematical tools, showed the conditions under which the different ials would be driven to zero. The theorem he proved is called the Factor Price Equalization Theorem....he also introduced the neoclassical synthesis--a synthesis of the old neoclassical microeconomics and the new (in the fifties) Keynesian macroeconomics . According to Samuelson, government intervention via fiscal and monetary policy is required to achieve full employment, but then at full employment the market works well, except at providing public goods and handling problems of externalities."

Works by Paul Anthony Samuelson:

• Foundations of Economic Analysis
  
• Economics (Textbook)
  
• International Trade and the Equalization of Factor Prices, Economic Journal
  
• Linear Programming and Economic Activity
  
• A Note on the Pure Theory of Consumer's Behavior, Economica
  
• The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure, Review of Economics and Statistics
  

Click on the icon to return to the list of economists.


Click on Léon Walras to return to the Walrasiad.