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One thought on “Paul Samuelson Obituary”

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  SteveG December 15, 2009 at 11:13 am

  Agreed, it is an excellent obituary. I learned things about Samuelson and Economics that I didn’t know from only learning economics from his book.

  A small quibble however. There was no mention of what behavioral economics has learned that tempers the desire to turn economics into a hard science by the application of mathematical theorems.

  You might have thought the following paragraph might have lead to an interesting tangent:

  Late in his career, Mr. Samuelson laid out the mathematics of stock price movements, an analysis that became the basis for Nobel Prize-winning research by his student Mr. Merton and Myron S. Scholes. They designed formulas that Wall Street analysts use to trade options and other complicated securities known as derivatives.

  That might be a bit much to expect in an obituary.