

Obituary: MIT's "foremost academic economist of the 20th century" - Fixnum
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/business/economy/14samuelson.html

======
bluntSpeech
_In orthodox economics, rationality became a straitjacket. Platonified
economists ignored the fact that people might prefer to do something other
than maximize their economic interests. This led to mathematical techniques
such as "maximization," or "optimization," on which Paul Samuelson built much
of his work. Optimization consists in finding the mathematically optimal
policy that an economic agent could pursue. For instance, what is the
"optimal" quantity you should allocate to stocks? It involves complicated
mathematics and thus raises a barrier to entry by non-mathematically trained
scholars. I would not be the first to say that this optimization set back
social science by reducing it from the intellectual and reflective discipline
that it was becoming to an attempt at an "exact science." By "exact science,"
I mean a second-rate engineering problem for those who want to pretend that
they are in the physics department — so-called physics envy. In other words,
an intellectual fraud._

Nassim Taleb, _The Black Swan_

------
miked
"World-class economist Paul Samuelson, a Nobel laureate, wrote in the tenth
edition of his textbook Economics: _“It is a vulgar mistake to think that most
people in Eastern Europe are miserable.”_ This, mind you, in the aftermath of
the 1953 East German uprising, the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the Poznan
protests in Poland, the 1968 revolution in Czechoslovakia— all suppressed with
bloodshed by Soviet tanks. In the eleventh edition, he took out the word
“vulgar.” In the 1985 twelfth edition, that entire passage had disappeared.
Instead, he and his coauthor, William Nordhaus, substituted a sentence asking
whether Soviet political repression was “worth the economic gains.” This non-
question was identified as “one of the most profound dilemmas of human
society.” After 70 years of Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism that took at least
100 million lives, this was still a dilemma?

It seemed to me utterly incredible that an otherwise great economist could
parrot idiotic Marxist propaganda. At a time when the magnitude of the Soviet
economic disaster was apparent even to the most willfully blind Marxists in
Central Europe and the USSR, the 1985 Samuelson text offered this paragraph
about the Soviet economy:

 _But it would be misleading to dwell on the shortcomings. Every economy has
its contradictions and difficulties with incentives—witness the paradoxes
raised by the separation of ownership and control in America. . . . What
counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system
has been a powerful engine for economic growth...._ "

[http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/12/paul_sa...](http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/12/paul_samuelson_rip.php#comment-336772)

