Paul Samuelson
MIT economist (1915–2009) who mathematized micro and macro, authored a defining textbook, and linked welfare economics to public finance.
Samuelson’s *Economics* educated generations; his research spans revealed preference, public-goods theory, and the overlapping-generations framework. He helped professionalize the discipline while synthesizing Keynesian stabilization logic with neoclassical price theory—a posture often called the neoclassical synthesis.
In public argument he mixed tolerance for counter-cyclical policy with insistence on clear models: welfare claims should show assumptions; politics remained downstream from theorems.
Pedagogical legacy
Ideas scattered through this glossary—welfare trade-offs, simple multipliers, gains-from-trade figures—became common sense largely through his textbook voice.
Contrast on this site
Read him against Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek to see how a centrist technocratic style coexisted with sharper market-first challengers in the twentieth century.