Paul Samuelson

Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) was an American economist and the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (1970). His 1948 textbook Economics defined the post-war teaching of the discipline, and his 1947 monograph Foundations of Economic Analysis established the mathematical rigor of neoclassical economics by showing that optimization and equilibrium could be derived from a unified framework of variational principles.

Samuelson's influence was architectural: he built the bridge between the verbal tradition of Keynes and the formal apparatus of general equilibrium. The IS-LM framework — which he helped popularize as the 'neoclassical synthesis' — reduced Keynes's General Theory to a system of simultaneous equations, manageable, teachable, and policy-relevant. But this very manageability was also a domestication. The Keynesian economics that Samuelson built was not the monetary disequilibrium theory that Axel Leijonhufvud later recovered; it was a general equilibrium model with frictions, in which unemployment was a temporary deviation from market-clearing rather than a structural feature of monetary economies.

Samuelson's legacy is therefore double-edged. He made economics a rigorous science; he also made it a science that could not see the corridor until it had already collapsed.