William Samuelson, April 10, 2010

Good morning. I’m happy to speak on behalf of the entire Samuelson family.

Amidst all the kind words and celebration of our father, it’s important to recognize

and thank MIT for the special place it has always been for him.

The MIT economics department was truly a second family for dad. MIT 1940 was

the start of it all. It is now some seventy years later, and he never left. Until he

became an Emeritus professor (and eventually began to spend some winter

months in Florida), about the longest time he was away from MIT, ever was THREE

WEEKS. (Think of that in this age of foot-loose, globe-trotting academics.) In the

1960s, he turned down formal Washington duty with JFK partly for reasons of

biological family, but mostly I think to avoid any separation from his economics

family.

What a perfect fit. Mathematics ran through our father’s veins and here was an institution that even believed in numbering its buildings. Our father was something of an upstart; MIT at the time was an upstart. Teaching economics to MIT freshmen gave birth to the first edition of the textbook, Economics.

And what colleagues! From the generation of Bishop, Brown, Coleman, Domar,

Kindleberger, Modigliani, Schultz, and Siegel, to the cohort of Dornbusch, Fischer,

and Diamond, to Poterba and company in the present day. There were graduate

students galore including a young, card player named Merton. And of course, no

one has been a closer colleague and friend than a guy named Bob Solow, who

spanned the entire era.

Our father usually carried a yellow pad and he sometimes scribbled

notes/theorems in odd places: school events, graduation ceremonies, and all

manner of coffee shops and fast-food places. But, he never liked working at home.

(With six kids, things were too chaotic.)

His Newsweek columns, popular writings, and every word of 7 volumes of collected

works were produced in his MIT office. By him and by those tireless, unsung

heroines: Inez Crandall, Felicity Skidmore, Peggy Robison, Gloria Wiggin, Joyce

Willett Bradley, Joan Thompson, Eva Hakala, Aase Huggins, Kate Crowley, and

especially Janice Murray. (Over the years, he kept a lot of people busy.)

A psychiatrist might see MIT economics as some kind of womb and wonder: Is this

healthy? A financial economist would speculate whether being attached to one

institution for 70 years was economically efficient. I’d ask you to consider a

counterfactual. How much less would our dad have accomplished if he had been

anywhere else? A lot less! How much less happy would he have been? A lot less

happy!

One more thing. Despite popular rumor, our father harbored no ill will toward that

other university up the river. His close friends there spanned the alphabet: Arrow,

Bergson, Caves, Dorfman, Eckstein, Feldstein…and so on and so on, up through

Raiffa and Schelling to Zeckhauser.

His problem with Harvard was that it sometimes made lousy decisions. It did in

1940, and once again not so long ago. If Harvard students had had any vote and if

wiser minds had prevailed, Summers would be in Cambridge and Harvard’s gain

would be Washington’s loss.

Finally, not to belabor the obvious: Our father loved MIT. He loved the big things

and the little things about it. He loved its people. He loved talking economics lunch-

time, and over drinks at the faculty club just 3 floors up. In his 90s when his health

wasn’t always tip-top, he spent recuperative days in the MIT infirmary and

welcomed colleagues’ visits.

No one will ever make greater use of the sprawling blackboard in that 3rd floor

office in E52. Alas, we have no time-elapsed video of all the results derived on that

slate over the years. Samuelson and MIT – that was a match made in heaven.

But things change. A new generation follows the giants of the past. The old-style

faculty club (pub included) is no more, and the economics department is soon

leaving the third floor. But however it changes, MIT will always remain one thing.

In our father’s heart, it will always be the world’s greatest university.