Paul Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009) was the first American economist to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is considered to be one of the founders of the neoclassical synthesis (along with Hicks) and one of the first popularisers of Keynes' ideas.
His support for Keynesian economic ideas came out of growing up in the Great Depression. According to the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/...):
Samuelson's views were forged in the desperate conditions in which America found itself in 1932, the year he wandered into an economics lecture at Chicago University as a 17-year-old, and he was suspicious of policy-makers not from the same hard school. While professing great admiration for Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, he said that the head of America's central bank could not know what it was like to live through really tough times. "If you were born after 1950 [Bernanke was born in 1953], you don't have the feel of the Great Depression in your bones. Being a bright boy at MIT, it's not really a substitute for that."
When awarded the Nobel prize, the committee said the following of his contribution to economics:
More than any other contemporary economist, Samuelson has helped to raise the general analytical and methodological level in economic science. He has simply rewritten considerable parts of economic theory. He has also shown the fundamental unity of both the problems and analytical techniques in economics, partly by a systematic application of the methodology of maximization for a broad set of problems. This means that Samuelson's contributions range over a large number of different fields.
Samuelson’s career as an economist was incredibly prolific and his influence on the field crossed many of its sub-disciplines. In many senses, he is responsible for the creation of the field of comparative statics in his Foundations of Economic Analysis first published in 1947, (see http://en.wikipedia.org/...). His name appears in International Trade theory in the Stolper-Samuelson theorem of the Hecksher-Ohlin-Samuelson model (http://en.wikipedia.org/...) and for the Balassa-Samuelson effect(http://en.wikipedia.org/...), he invented revealed preference theory in consumer theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/...), in public finance theory in determination of optimal allocation of resources in public and private goods, in welfare economics with the Lindahl-Bowen-Samuelson conditions (http://en.wikipedia.org/...). His work in macroeconomics and growth is well known and highly regarded. He was also a supporter of guaranteed income or basic income hypothesis. Although a champion of the mathematisation of economics and a great believer in economics being a rigourous science, he also recognised the importance of the difference of what the theory said and the world outside economic theory, from Larry Elliot of the Guardian:
Despite the rigorous use of mathematics, Samuelson always recognised the difference between what economists learned in the classroom and the insights they developed on the streets – a lesson currently being relearned following the inability of economists to spot the warning signs of the current crisis.
Samuelson was a life-long democrat and an adviser to democratic presidents. According to the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/...):
He championed activist economic policies as an adviser to the White House during the presidencies of John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s and continued dispensing policy advice until the end of his life.
Larry Elliot of The Guardian (same link as above) has two interesting notes on Samuelson’s advising of Kennedy and Johnson that I would like to repeat:
A lifelong Democrat, Samuelson gave the newly elected President Kennedy a 40-minute seminar on economics on a beach at the family's retreat at Hyannis Port in Massachusetts. Kennedy, who had defeated Richard Nixon on a balanced-budget ticket, was taken aback to find his teacher suggesting that he should seek to boost the US economy through a Keynesian cut in taxes.
Samuelson went on to advise Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, and coined the term "stagflation" to describe "a period of rising unemployment and high inflation" at a seminar called by Gerald Ford in 1974. But he was never really at home "inside the Beltway" and once boasted that he had never spent an entire week in Washington.
Why is an alternative economist notifying the daily kos of the death of one of the leaders of the mainstream economics? Well, in addition to being a life-long democrat and a sympathiser with the poorest of society, Paul Samuelson (along with Robert Tobin) was one of the few of the leaders of the mainstream that actually discussed ideas, debated and listened to alternative economists. He participated in conferences in commemoration of Piero Sraffa and contributed to volumes in his honour.
According to Larry Elliot of the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/...), Samuelson was born in Gary, Indiana to jewish parents from Poland, his family later moved to Chicago. He studied at Harvard under the tutelage of Joseph Schumpeter, Alvin Hansen and Wassily Leontief. He became an assistant professor at MIT in 1940 and became a full professor 7 years later. He received the Nobel Prize in 1970 and a National Medal of Science (from President Clinton) in 1996. He is survived by his second wife (his first wife predeceased him in 1978) and 6 children from his first marriage.