http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/business/economy/14samuelson.html?_r=1&hp
More dry powder over here… better duck out of this before it blows up…
May peace be upon his soul.
Now if only the lovefest for Keynes would die, too.
“Mr. Samuelson explained Keynesian economics to American presidents, world leaders, members of Congress and the Federal Reserve Board, not to mention other economists. He was a consultant to the United States Treasury, the Bureau of the Budget and the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.”
I wonder if he ever regretted it…
It sounds like he lived a glorious life of luxury and fame. How wonderful.
Hell… I just looked him up… 2 days ago for the first time. Wierd. Anyway, the second most influential Keynsian in history is gone.
I do say, that even though he was an annoying enemy to deal with, I can’t help but a feel a tinge of sadness that he died. Call it sympathy with the human condition.
…Have you meet Paul Krugman?
What do you mean?
I am sad to say that I am mostly indirectly familiar with Samuelson’s contributions, which appear to substantial. 
It is always sad news when such an intellectual giant passes away.
Maybe after finals are over, I will try to get through part of his PhD thesis, Foundations of Economic Analysis. I flipped through it once before, but didn’t have time to seriously work with it.
Few people have done as much damage to the science of economics than this man. He might arguably have been more influential than Keynes due to the wide reach of his textbook. Considering the widespread misery the ideas he peddled have wrought upon the world, I don’t think I’ll be shedding too many tears over the passing of this statist apologist.
He’s been dead for years.
A horrible economist, but rest in peace anyway.
Samuelson’s ideas caused wide spread misery? Come on guys.
What did he say or do to cause “wide spread misery”? Let’s hear some specifics.
I just googled an obit for him, and look what was in it.
The textbook introduced generations of students to the revolutionary ideas of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who in the 1930s developed the theory that modern market economies could become trapped in depression and would then need a strong boost from government spending or tax cuts, in addition to lenient monetary policy, to get back on track. No student would ever again rest comfortable with the 19th-century nostrum that private markets would cure unemployment without need of government intervention.
I’m not sure what else you’d call Preaching the Gospel of Keynes, Student. Krugman’s his heir.
Good riddance
He was a big fan of the Phillip curve. From wiki:
“William Phillips, a New Zealand born economist, wrote a paper in 1958 titled The Relationship between Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wages in the United Kingdom 1861–1957, which was published in the quarterly journal Economica. In the paper Phillips describes how he observed an inverse relationship between money wage changes and unemployment in the British economy over the period examined. Similar patterns were found in other countries and in 1960 Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow took Phillips’ work and made explicit the link between inflation and unemployment: when inflation was high, unemployment was low, and vice-versa.”
So in a lot of countries around the world, government inflated the money supply hoping to that inflation would solve unemployment, what happened was the opposite, inflation totally messed up with the economy and expectations, contributing to plenty of misery and wasted development around the globe. Well, Paul Samuelson was basically the embodiment of the Pretense of Knowledge that Hayek warned us about.
Dude . . .