------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (March 2007)

Michael Szenberg, Aron Gottesman, and Lall Ramrattan, _Paul 
Samuelson: On Being an Economist_. New York: Jorge Pinto Books, 2005. 
xiii + 149 pp. $20 (paperback), ISBN: 0-9742615-3-X.

Reviewed for EH.NET by J. Daniel Hammond, Department of Economics, 
Wake Forest University.


This slim volume is in Jorge Pinto's Working Biography series, books 
that are intended to be aids to young people who are undecided about 
their career path and mature people contemplating a career change. 
The series introduces readers to fields via life stories of 
individuals who are among the field's leaders. Other entries in the 
series are biographies of illustrator and graphic designer Nigel 
Holmes, Chinese real estate developer Zhang Xin, and branding 
consultant Alan Siegel. While the idea of using the life story of a 
giant in a field to inform and inspire those in search of a career 
path is not without merit, the choice of Paul Samuelson for a model 
of a career in economics brings out the risks of this approach. Who 
among the intended audience of this book could aspire to follow Paul 
Samuelson's footsteps? The authors, economists at Pace University and 
the University of California, Berkeley, suggested Samuelson to the 
publisher as the subject for an economist's biography because of his 
rare abilities and accomplishments. Of Samuelson they write, "He 
dazzles us with an overwhelming display of learning, insight, energy, 
aplomb, modesty, profundity, and an amazing inventiveness. He 
single-handedly revitalized and transformed the discipline of 
economics" (p. 1). Any number of accomplished, but less lustrous, and 
perhaps younger, economists could have served the publisher's 
purposes better.

How many economists could honestly make the remark that Samuelson has 
made about his first encounter with economics: "I became an economist 
quite by chance, primarily because the analysis was so interesting 
and easy" (p. 33). At the conclusion of his first economics class at 
the University of Chicago in 1932 Samuelson "suspected (wrongly 
suspected) I was missing out on some mysterious complexity" (p. 34). 
Ordinary intelligent people who do not have Paul Samuelson's gift of 
genius could not make this claim. Nor, I suspect, could empirically 
inclined students of economics. Empirical economics is easy only if 
empirical economics is nothing more that feeding data into an 
econometric software package. But it is not that. It is discovering 
something about how the social world works, and society yields her 
secrets with great resistance.

Nor is solving economic problems easy, not analytically or 
practically. From its beginnings economic analysis has been in 
service to the end of resolving social problems. Consider Samuelson's 
"simple ideology that favors the underdog and (other things equal) 
abhors inequality" (p. 34). The difficulty starts with the meaning of 
equality. Is what matters equality of opportunity or equality of 
result? Then, how much and what do we put in the ceteris paribus 
pound, natural ability, acquired ability, environment? How much 
leverage do social scientists and public officials have to affect the 
income distribution? Forty years after the beginning of the Johnson 
administration's Great Society initiatives, income in the United 
States is not distributed anywhere near equally. In a complex society 
the simple ideology of equality does not beget simple fixes, no 
matter how sophisticated one's economic theory may be.

The ease with which Paul Samuelson became an economics prodigy, and 
winner of the profession's most coveted awards, is no doubt testament 
to his genius and hard work, but perhaps equally so to the type of 
economic analysis he pursued. A large part of Samuelson's work has 
been translation of economic ideas into the language of mathematics. 
This began at the beginning, when in his first class at Chicago 
Samuelson perceived that Malthus's population doctrine was "simple 
differential equation stuff" (p. 34). The discussion of Samuelson's 
method portrays mathematics as a language among languages, no better 
or worse than English prose, but nonetheless a language superior to 
prose for expression of economic ideas due to its precision, clarity, 
and multidimensionality. The authors suggest that mathematization of 
economics was necessary for the field to become a science, and that 
Paul Samuelson's translations of prose problems into mathematics and 
analysis of the mathematics was a critical part of the elevation of 
economics to scientific status.

Samuelson is portrayed as a scientist. One of the features of science 
is that its results can be replicated, whether by repeating a 
laboratory or statistical experiment or verifying mathematical 
analysis. In this way science is public and democratic. Science is 
not private revelation. Yet, the authors made a curious choice of 
epigram for their chapter on Samuelson's method. The statement, by 
Andr??? Gide, is, "I will maintain that the artist needs only this: a 
special world of which he alone has the key" (p. 61). Two features of 
the epigram are notable, that Gide writes of the artist, not the 
scientist, and the statement's Gnostic flavor, suggesting knowledge 
available only to a select few.

This leads to a final observation about the authors' choice of Paul 
Samuelson as an exemplar of economists. Because Samuelson's scholarly 
articles are inaccessible to those who does not have facility in 
advanced mathematics, readers learn very little of his work as a 
scholar. What they are presented with instead is Samuelson the 
teacher, textbook author, celebrity, and raconteur. This makes good 
reading, but is little help to anyone who desires to know what would 
be involved for themselves in being an economist.


J. Daniel Hammond is the editor, with Claire H. Hammond of _Making 
Chicago Price Theory: Friedman-Stigler Correspondence, 1945-1957_ 
(Routledge, 2006).
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