‘The stock market has predicted nine of the last five recessions.’ –Paul Samuelson
Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and one of the foremost academic economists of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94.
{ NY Times | Continue reading | Read more: Nobelprize.org }
It’s hard to convey the full extent of Samuelson’s greatness. Most economists would love to have written even one seminal paper — a paper that fundamentally changes the way people think about some issue. Samuelson wrote dozens: from international trade to finance to growth theory to speculation to well, just about everything, underlying much of what we know is a key Samuelson paper that set the agenda for generations of scholars.
{ Paul Krugman/NY Times | Continue reading }
Q: “At this stage, how would you rank Keynes?”
A: “I still think he was the greatest economist of the twentieth century and one of the three greatest of all time.”
Q: “Who are number one and number two?”
A: “Adam Smith and Leon Walras.”
Walras was a nineteenth century French economist who taught at the University of Lausanne. He was the first economist to write down the equations for a ‘general equilibrium’ of the entire economy, incorporating the markets of everything from sugar to iPods. He is widely regarded as the founder of mathematical economics. “We all march in his footsteps,” Samuelson said of Walras. (…)
“Like herpes, math is here to stay,” he said.
{ Interview with Paul Samuelson | New Yorker | Continue reading | And more: Falken Blog }
