Paul Samuelson

Derivatives Markets

by David Goldenberg  · 2 Mar 2016  · 819pp  · 181,185 words

would like to thank the giants of the derivatives field including: Louis Bachelier, Fischer Black, John Cox, Darrell Duffie, Jonathan Ingersoll, Kiyoshi Itô, Robert Merton, Paul Samuelson, Myron Scholes, Stephen Ross, Mark Rubinstein, and many others. I sincerely hope that the reader enjoys traveling along the path to understanding Derivatives Markets. David

The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics

by Rod Hill and Anthony Myatt  · 15 Mar 2010

beneficial to all. But that consensus has been disturbed by recent arguments by Gomory and Baumol (2000) and Paul Samuelson (2004) that offshoring could produce net economic losses. This created quite a stir, because Paul Samuelson is not your average econ­ omist. Winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 1970, he wrote much

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to now oppose other countries doing the same? 4 Must the long-run gains from all forms of international trade more than offset the losses? Paul Samuelson recently described this view as a ‘popular polemical untruth’. Why? Suggestions for further reading Take a look at ‘Appendix A: The limits of dissent’ in

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. … No one can even explain why these events rationally ought to have happened even after they have happened.’ iv Micro near-efficiency and macro inefficiency Paul Samuelson (1998) often remarked that while the stock market is mostly micro efficient, it is macro inefficient. The behavioural research (discussed in Section 2 of this

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their jobs, putting downward pressure on wages in rich countries. Increasing returns lead to arbitrary patterns of specialization both within and between countries. Technological change Paul Samuelson (2004) describes what happens to countries’ national incomes if technology changes as a result of local developments. To adapt his analysis to our simple Ricardian

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

by Richard H. Thaler  · 10 May 2015  · 500pp  · 145,005 words

bit into the history of economics. The discipline underwent something of a revolution after World War II. Economists led by Kenneth Arrow, John Hicks, and Paul Samuelson accelerated an ongoing trend of making economic theory more mathematically formal. The two central concepts of economics remained the same—namely, that agents optimize and

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around the time of Fisher, as he started on the theory of how Econs should behave, but it fell to a twenty-two-year-old Paul Samuelson, then in graduate school, to finish the job. Samuelson, whom many consider to be the greatest economist of the twentieth century, was a prodigy who

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normal life? Consider a related game called the Public Goods Game. To understand the economic significance of this game, we turn back to the great Paul Samuelson, who formalized the concept of a public good in a three-page paper published in 1954. The guy did not belabor things. A public good

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the strong favorite. The behavioral team was led by Herb Simon, Amos, and Danny, and was buttressed by Kenneth Arrow, an economic theorist who, like Paul Samuelson, deserved to win several Nobel Prizes in economics, though he had to settle for just one. The younger behavioral crowd, which included Bob Shiller, Richard

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decided to try to find a solution to the equity premium puzzle. To understand our approach, it will help to consider another classic article by Paul Samuelson, in which he describes a lunchtime conversation with a colleague at the MIT faculty club. Samuelson noted that he’d read somewhere that the definition

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, including a recent prize in 2013.§ But it was not always so. Although some of the intellectual giants of the field, such as Kenneth Arrow, Paul Samuelson, and James Tobin, all made important contributions to financial economics in the 1950s and 1960s, finance was not a mainstream topic in economics departments, and

The Missing Billionaires: A Guide to Better Financial Decisions

by Victor Haghani and James White  · 27 Aug 2023  · 314pp  · 122,534 words

in the sub‐field known as “lifetime consumption and portfolio choice,” an area first formulated and explored in the 1960s by Nobel Prize‐winning economists Paul Samuelson and Robert C. Merton. The basic problem addressed is to determine the choices that a person should make with regard to investing, saving, and spending

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bit lower than the historical risk and return in excess of T‐bills of the US stock market, but not miles away. 2. Merton, 1969. Paul Samuelson, Merton's mentor, is also credited for his contribution to the development of this formula. 3. Kelly, 1956. 4 A Taste of the Merton Share

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to such things. The Fallacy of Large Numbers In a playfully written 1963 article titled “Risk and Uncertainty: A Fallacy of Large Numbers,” MIT economist Paul Samuelson tells the story of offering “some lunch colleagues to bet each $200 to $100 that the side of a coin they specified would not appear

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possible outcomes and how likely they are to occur, which in a nutshell is exactly what Expected Utility is designed to do. As MIT economist Paul Samuelson put it: “No slave can serve two independent masters. If one is an Expected Utility maximizer, he cannot generally be a maximizer of the probability

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. —John Stuart Mill This Isn't How Ordinary People Make Decisions Maximizing Expected Utility was put forward by modern economists such as Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson as both a descriptive and normative model of decision‐making. It was hoped that many micro‐ and macroeconomic phenomena could be modeled using Expected Utility

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sizing strategies too. This rebuttal was presented in “Why we should not make mean log of wealth big though years to act are long” by Paul Samuelson (1979), which he famously wrote using only words of one syllable. The Long Run Is Very Long One of the statements put forward by advocates

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but uncertain personal longevity. The Merton‐Samuelson “Lifetime Consumption and Portfolio Choice” Framework In 1969, twenty‐five‐year‐old Robert C. Merton and his mentor Paul Samuelson separately published the first solutions to the lifetime spending and investing policy problem that met the five desirable characteristics we just listed. Remarkably, this was

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most popularly linked to the efficient market hypothesis, his work built upon that of many predecessors from Louis Bachelier (1900) to Friedrich Hayek (1945) to Paul Samuelson (1965). 7. APT was introduced by Ross (1976), but Robert C. Merton (1973) proposed the first multi‐factor, intertemporal extension of CAPM. 8. Treynor, 1961

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought

by Andrew W. Lo  · 3 Apr 2017  · 733pp  · 179,391 words

Markets Hypothesis has become at least as prominent a hallmark, thanks to Gene Fama. EFFICIENT MARKETS UNPACKED Two economists with very dissimilar styles of thought, Paul Samuelson and Eugene Fama, reached the same conclusion about efficient markets. Fama’s fascination with computers, data, and statistical analysis led him down a very different

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they played a role in creating or upholding an earlier theory. However, like evolution, science itself is an ongoing process also subject to natural selection. Paul Samuelson often remarked, “Science progresses funeral by funeral,” paraphrasing the great physicist Max Planck with a pithy if somewhat morbid characterization of the process of scientific

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true believers in market rationality. In that year, Herbert Simon published his Ph.D. thesis, Administrative Behavior. It appeared, ironically enough, the same year as Paul Samuelson’s Ph.D. thesis, Foundations of Economic Analysis. Administrative Behavior was a remarkably underwhelming title for a classic that would become the Magna Carta of

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could be quantified. In fact, he learned advanced mathematical methods precisely so that he could work toward the “hardening” of the social sciences. Simon followed Paul Samuelson’s mathematical innovations in economics with interest, and made significant and technically demanding contributions of his own to the field. Even so, the GSIA was

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does the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis compare to the Efficient Markets Hypothesis? Let’s begin with the theory of the individual consumer, just as the young Paul Samuelson did in 1947. In Samuelson’s view—now a cornerstone of modern mathematical economics—individuals always maximize their expected utility. This means that consumers always

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it was studied largely by philosophers and theologians, not mathematicians. But a sharp break from this tradition occurred in 1947, thanks to none other than Paul Samuelson, the single most important economist of the twentieth century. As we saw in chapter 1, Samuelson played a critical role in formulating the Efficient Markets

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environment. Many questions in economics became much more intellectually manageable after receiving the Samuelson treatment. We can read the classics of economists who came before Paul Samuelson—great thinkers like Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, or John Maynard Keynes—and become lost in the abstractions of their lengthy prose. Samuelson

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to the widely accepted mathematical framework for quantifying and managing risk formulated by the well-known statistician Leonard Jimmie Savage—the same Savage who introduced Paul Samuelson to Bachelier’s thesis—in his pioneering book The Foundations of Statistics. 10. Knight (1921). 11. Kahneman and Tversky (1984). 12. Clark (2008). 13. Société

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Oppenheim, Jim Orlin, Sandy Pentland, Bob Pindyck, Tommy Poggio, Jim Poterba, Bill Pounds, Drazen Prelec, Roberto Rigobon, Ed Roberts, Nancy Rose, Daniela Rus, the late Paul Samuelson, Dick Schmalensee, Phil Sharp, David Staelin, Tom Stoker, Dan Stroock, Gerry Sussman, Peter Szolovits, Josh Tenenbaum, John Tsitsiklis, Roy Welsch, Patrick Winston, and Victor Zhu

The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)

by Phil Thornton  · 7 May 2014

– the rise, fall, rise … and fall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Chapter 6 Friedrich Hayek – the archetypal libertarian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Chapter 7 Milton Friedman – father of monetarism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Chapter 8 Paul Samuelson – the neoclassical synthesist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Chapter 9 Gary Becker – economics in the real world . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 Chapter 10 Daniel Kahneman – economic psychologist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 v Acknowledgements

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role of policymakers. This debate, which dominated the second half of the 20th century, was dominated by John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson. More recently the focus has been moved back to the individual by economists such as Gary Becker, with his classical approach to understanding why consumers

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mechanism of supply and demand. Over time this will become the general equilibrium theory, set out a century later and formalised in greater detail by Paul Samuelson, whom we will meet later (see Chapter 8), and other eminent economists. Chapter 1 • Adam Smith9 Smith is not saying that people are motivated

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in 2,000 hours make 20,000 players. The total output is now 45,000 or a near-20 per cent increase. The Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson, whom we shall meet later (in Chapter 8), was once challenged by the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam to ‘name one proposition in all of the social

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his publishers to offer the book at the knockdown price of five shillings (25p) to capture what he saw as a popular market. As Professor Paul Samuelson, one of the economists who took on Keynes’s thinking, pointed out just after Keynes’s death: ‘It is a badly written book, poorly organised

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Four decades ago few people outside the academic community would have recognised Hayek’s name. Indeed, when Hayek was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1974, Paul Samuelson (Chapter 8) said that the majority of senior economists at Harvard and MIT did not even know the name of the new laureate. His tussle

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of John Maynard Keynes gave way to the age of Milton Friedman’. One telling indicator of the impact Friedman had on economic doctrine is how Paul Samuelson, the Nobel Prize-winning economist whom we shall meet in the next chapter, subtly changed his interpretation of the significance of monetarism between new editions

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7 • Milton Friedman165 Abraham Hirsch and Neil de Marchi, Milton Friedman (University of Michigan Press, 1991). William Ruger, Milton Friedman (Continuum, 2011). CHAPTER 8 Paul Samuelson– the neoclassical synthesist 167 168 The Great Economists ‘I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws – or crafts its advanced treaties – if I

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can write its economics textbooks.’ Paul Samuelson, Foreword to The Principles of Economics Course: A Handbook for Instructors, 1990 In the official speech awarding the Nobel Prize in economic sciences to

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Paul Samuelson in 1970, Professor Assar Lindbeck, of the Stockholm School of Economics, said that more than any other contemporary economist, the new laureate had contributed to

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sometimes think of myself as the last “generalist” in economics’ http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/ economic-sciences/laureates/1970/samuelson-bio.html Chapter 8 • Paul Samuelson169 setting and to merge that doctrine with classical economics to produce the then new field of neoclassical economics. He died on 13 December 2009

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at the age of 94. Early life and influences Paul Samuelson was born in 1915 in the then booming steel town of Gary, Indiana, in the United States to Jewish immigrants from Poland. His family moved

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, Foundations of Economic Analysis, the first draft of which won him the university’s David A. Wells 2. ‘An Interview with Paul A. Samuelson’, in Paul Samuelson and William Barnett, Inside the Economist’s Mind (Wiley/Blackwell, 2007). 170 The Great Economists Prize in 1941. The book shows that he was clearly

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of his career. While other economists in this book have been philosophers, speculators or government advisers, Samuelson was first and foremost an educator. Chapter 8 • Paul Samuelson171 Key economic theories and writings Samuelson was an increasingly prolific academic economist, producing an immense volume of audiovisual material, correspondence, magazine articles, research articles

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3. P. Samuelson, ‘Lord Keynes and the General Theory’, Econometrica, 14 (1946), 187–99. 4. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/06/an-interviewwith-paul-samuelson-part-one/19572/ 172 The Great Economists fiscal multiplier, the propensity to consume, the paradox of thrift, countercyclical fiscal policy and the concept of GDP

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on free-market economics. It should not be overlooked that Samuelson also set out the basics of the microeconomic market system – why and Chapter 8 • Paul Samuelson173 how consumers and businesses behave in the way that they do. Economics devotes considerable room to explaining how markets function and how they solve

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demand (accelerator). The model showed how markets magnify the impact of outside shocks and turn, say, an initial one-dollar increase in foreign Chapter 8 • Paul Samuelson175 investment into a several-dollar increase in total domestic income. Public goods and public finance While Economics is certain to remain Samuelson’s lasting

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. Paul A. Samuelson, ‘The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure’, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 36(4) (November 1954), pp. 387–9. Chapter 8 • Paul Samuelson177 pricing system cannot force consumers to reveal their demand for public goods, and so cannot force producers to meet that demand. Samuelson concluded that

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workers’ savings (such as pension funds taking large shareholdings in businesses). 6. W. Nordhaus, ‘Paul Samuelson and Global Public Goods: a commemorative essay for Paul Samuelson’ (5 May 2005) http://www.econ.yale. edu/~nordhaus/homepage/PASandGPG.pdf Chapter 8 • Paul Samuelson179 While Samuelson’s theory was purposefully model-based and made assumptions that did

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about the number of goods people said they wanted to buy, economists should work out which goods 7. http://www.voxeu.org/article/paul-samuelson-incomparable-economist Chapter 8 • Paul Samuelson181 consumers prefer over others. The revealed preference theory works backwards from consumers’ purchasing decisions to deduce their preferences. A consumer shows her

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develop a well-defined set of preferences for society as a whole. While changes in society will make some better off and some Chapter 8 • Paul Samuelson183 worse off, in what Samuelson said was a ‘just’ society, compensation payments would be made to maximise the collective social welfare. Although the theory

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but returns on capital fall. While both sides will benefit there will be a split in how those gains and losses are distributed. Chapter 8 • Paul Samuelson185 Samuelson and Stolper’s analysis is essential in understanding why wages are rising in emerging economies and why the manufacturing base is shrinking in

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equalising between the two countries. In reality this does not always happen. Other factors such as migration controls, different levels of technology and Chapter 8 • Paul Samuelson187 differences in the quality of the rule of law between countries mean that prices and wages do not always fall in line (such as

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Scholes, but also led indirectly to the massive growth in complex financial products. 188 The Great Economists Long-term legacy There is no doubt that Paul Samuelson has left a permanent imprint on the understanding and teaching of economics. In a career that spanned seven decades he wrote innumerable papers on a

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Economy, by John Stuart Mill; and Marshall’s Principles of Economics (Chapter 4). His work transformed how economics was – and still is – taught. Chapter 8 • Paul Samuelson189 Looked at from a more recent perspective, Samuelson’s Economics took Keynes’s General Theory (Chapter 5) – which was never something that could be

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with Milton 8. M. Szenberg, L. Ramrattan and A.A. Gottesman (eds), Samuelsonian Economics and the Twenty-First Century (Oxford University Press, 2006). Chapter 8 • Paul Samuelson191 Friedman and Henry Wallich, a Yale economist and US central banker. Much of that period saw him sparring with Friedman in particular. Although Samuelson

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proof. Only time will tell what impact that debate will have on Samuelson’s long-term reputation. Further reading K. Puttaswamaiah, Paul Samuelson and the Foundations of Modern Economics (Transaction Publishers, 2001). Paul Samuelson, Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947). Paul A. Samuelson, Economics: an introductory analysis (1948). Paul A. Samuelson, Collected Scientific Papers (1966

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). Paul Samuelson (ed.), Inside the Economist’s Mind (2007). Mark Skousen, ‘The Perseverance of Paul Samuelson’s Economics’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 11(2) (1997), pp. 137–52. E. Cary Soloki and Robert M

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. Brown (eds), Paul Samuelson and Modern Economics Theory (McGraw-Hill, 1983). Michael Szenberg, Lall Ramrattan and Aron A. Gottesman (eds), Samuelsonian Economics and the Twenty-First Century (Oxford University

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’s radical pieces of research was to apply an economic interpretation of decision making to how families made decisions. We saw (in Chapter 8) how Paul Samuelson said that families should be seen as units where members cooperate to maximise their overall utility. Becker went further, looking at the allocation of time

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Kahneman (2002) 218, 220 Paul Krugman (2008) 180, 191 Simon Kuznets (1971) 148 Robert Lucas (1995) 202 Robert Merton (1997) 187 Edmund Phelps (2006) 213 Paul Samuelson (1970) 168 Myron Scholes (1997) 187 Vernon Smith (2002) 218 non-accelerating inflation of unemployment (NAIRU) 153–5 Nordhaus, William 171, 178 North American Free

Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street

by Peter L. Bernstein  · 19 Jun 2005  · 425pp  · 122,223 words

it describes: Fischer Black, Eugene Fama, William Fouse, Hayne Leland, Harry Markowitz, John McQuown, Robert C. Merton, Merton Miller, Franco Modigliani, Barr Rosenberg, Mark Rubinstein, Paul Samuelson, Myron Scholes, William Sharpe, James Tobin, Jack Treynor, and James Vertin. Each of them spent long periods of time with me in interviews, and most

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the subject matter well beyond the chapters that were their immediate concern. In this regard, I hope I may be forgiven if I single out Paul Samuelson, my friend of more than fifty years. He served uncomplainingly as my mentor, inspiration, and inexhaustible research associate from the very beginning; the accumulation of

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, PC&I. 8. Judson (1979). 9. Gould (1991). 10. Vertin (1974). PART I Setting the Scene Chapter 1 Are Stock Prices Predictable? It is doubtful. Paul Samuelson, economist and Nobel laureate, once remarked that it is not easy to get rich in Las Vegas, at Churchill Downs, or at the local Merrill

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book by Bachelier, published in 1914, on speculation and investment. Fascinated, he sent postcards to his economist friends, asking “Ever heard of this guy?”18 Paul Samuelson, who was just then beginning to explore theories of market behavior and valuation on his own, could not find the book in the MIT library

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professionals never had a chance to begin with. The 1934 study was the work of Holbrook Working of Stanford. Working was hardly a dynamic personality. Paul Samuelson, who classes Working among the greats, described him to me as “a dry stick . . . not a sparkling expositor”3 and recalled seeing Holbrook, his economist

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qualify the neat theorems in the economics textbooks to fit the realities of the financial markets. Fortunately, the right man showed up for the job: Paul Samuelson of MIT, whom a student once described as “a human mainframe.” So compelling were the prospects of a theory of capital markets—and the impact

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work from 1937 to 1986, run to five volumes. They include 388 articles filling 4,665 pages—and a sixth volume is on its way. Paul Samuelson and Modern Economic Theory, a celebration of his contribution to economic theory written in 1983 by his contemporaries, extols his accomplishments in ten fields of

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with Chicago colleagues during the 1960s. ••• Fama found one aspect of the Chicago environment especially congenial. Unlike the more theory-oriented atmosphere at MIT, where Paul Samuelson had developed his ideas about speculative prices, Chicago attracted scholars who were keenly interested in collecting facts—an activity that appealed to Fama. At the

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pleased, until they realized that the huge pile of spools would fill the room the faculty used for their daily coffee breaks. No thanks! When Paul Samuelson told me this story, he commented, “Finding any information on that tape would have been more difficult than writing the full text of the Encyclopedia

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with 20 straight winning flips.”22 But what about the Buffets, Baruchs, Grahams, Neffs, and Lynches? Are they in the same class as the orangutans? Paul Samuelson admits that such market geniuses must exist, even in a totally efficient market: “It is not ordered in heaven, or by the second law of

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difference. Even in the catastrophic market of 1929–1932, when the average stock fell by 90 percent, Scott Paper and Minnesota Mining rose in price. Paul Samuelson and his cohorts consider questions like these a waste of time, because theory demonstrates that stocks will sell for what they are worth.a If

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were already taking into account:—time, interest rates, the current price of the stock, and the exercise price specified in the option contract. I saw Paul Samuelson once in a while on social occasions, but I was unaware that he, as usual, had started another ball rolling with a paper published in

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1968, MIT was the only graduate school that would accept Robert Merton, now of Harvard Business School, when he decided to abandon math for economics. Paul Samuelson immediately selected Merton as an assistant and collaborator and stimulated his interest in option pricing. Merton was also an active participant with Black and Scholes

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two issues contained articles by Sharpe on risk and performance measurement, by Fischer Black on the random walk, by James Lorie on diversification, and by Paul Samuelson on efficient markets. I invited James Vertin to contribute the lead article in the first issue, because I knew he would come on strong. “The

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offering many varieties of risk control. Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller emphasized the critical role played by arbitrage in determining the value of securities. And Paul Samuelson and Eugene Fama were there to remind investors that, in an unpredictable market, they had better not venture forth unprepared. Preparation for unpredictable situations is

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Williams’s book during a quiet afternoon in the library at the University of Chicago. James Tobin freely admits to being an “ivory tower economist.” Paul Samuelson, for whom finance serves as Sunday painting, is ambivalent over whether he has found something trivially obvious or dramatically sweeping. William Sharpe survives an abrasive

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of investing that caught their fancy. It was the purity of the free market dynamics, the best that the study of economics can offer. Remember Paul Samuelson’s reaction when he heard about Kendall’s Demon of Chance: “Work the other side of the street! The nonpredictability of future prices from past

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Corporate Debt: the Risk Structure of Interest Rates.” Journal of Finance, Vol. XXIX, No. 2 (May), pp. 449–470. Merton, Robert C. 1983. “Paul Samuelson’s Financial Economics.” In Paul Samuelson and Modern Economic Theory, Cary E. Brown and Robert M. Solow, eds. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company. Merton, Robert C. 1988. Personal

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. 15, pp. 1–42. Samuelson, Paul A. 1974. “Challenge to Judgment.” Journal of Portfolio Management, Vol. I (Fall), pp. 17–19. Samuelson, Paul A. 1983. Paul Samuelson and Modern Economic Theory, Cary E. Brown and Robert M. Solow, eds. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company. Samuelson, Paul A. 1986a. “Economics in My

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implicit out-of-the-money/in-the-money pricing formulas put valuation Options markets over-the-counter Pacific Stock Exchange Paul A. Samuelson: Critical Reassessments Paul Samuelson and Modern Economic Theory Pension funds corporate performance evaluation stock holdings Performance analysis Performance measurement Performance quotient (P.Q.) Personal trusts Philadelphia Stock Exchange Polaroid

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street

by Justin Fox  · 29 May 2009  · 461pp  · 128,421 words

The modern quantitative approach to investing is assembled out of equal parts poker strategy and World War II gunnery experience. 4. A Random Walk from Paul Samuelson to Paul Samuelson The proposition that stock movements are mostly unpredictable goes from intellectual curiosity to centerpiece of an academic movement. 5. Modigliani and Miller Arrive at

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built a contraption of interconnected water-filled cisterns that he described as “the physical analogue of the ideal economic market.”14 Many decades later, economist Paul Samuelson judged this work to be “the greatest doctoral dissertation in economics ever written.”15 It launched Fisher into a leading role among the world’s

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represent the maladies of the national economy known as recession and depression.17 “This was not a perfect bicycle,” recalled one of the young Keynesians, Paul Samuelson, “but it was the best wheel in town.”18 The perfect bicycle that was mathematical equilibrium economics remained intact. And as memories of the Depression

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everybody knew that stock price movements were completely random? CHAPTER 4 A RANDOM WALK FROM PAUL SAMUELSON TO PAUL SAMUELSON The proposition that stock movements are mostly unpredictable goes from intellectual curiosity to centerpiece of an academic movement. WHEN PAUL SAMUELSON ARRIVED AT the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1940, allowed to slip away from Harvard

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work in the market were to resonate, it would have to do so where financial markets mattered—in the United States. Like Prais and Houthakker, Paul Samuelson could immediately see the link between randomness and a well-functioning financial market, but unlike them he cared enough about investing to find it interesting

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Bills” won the Irving Fisher prize for best economics dissertation in the nation. It was published as a book, complete with an admiring introduction by Paul Samuelson. “I was totally dumbfounded when that happened, because I wasn’t even an economist,” said Roll. After years of looking down at the work being

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nonetheless dubious that Wall Street’s young stars could reliably trounce the market. Such claims smacked of that great economic impossibility: the free lunch. Even Paul Samuelson took a stand. Testifying in 1967 before the Senate Banking Committee, which was considering new legislation to deal with the burgeoning fund industry, Samuelson declared

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made him a far more effective ambassador to the outside world than, say, Gene Fama. The book was immediately hailed by Forbes as a classic. Paul Samuelson said it would become the “Dr. Spock of investment.”34 In fact it has held up much better than that; Spock’s Baby and Child

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later ended up on Vanguard’s board. More directly on topic (and on Bogle’s reading list at the time) was a 1974 essay by Paul Samuelson in the Journal of Portfolio Management, a wonky new publication for quantitatively inclined money managers, pension executives, and such.36 Samuelson declared that “most portfolio

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to come. It was one of the great practical triumphs in the history of the social sciences. AFTER THE LAUNCH OF THE Vanguard index fund, Paul Samuelson announced in his Newsweek column that he had celebrated the birth of his first grandson by buying the boy a few shares.41 Ben Graham

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Kendall saw the “graceful head” of the bell curve rising up “amid the uproar of the Chicago wheat pit.” A few years after that, economist Paul Samuelson and physicist M. F. M. Osborne separately proposed that stock price changes followed a wandering, unpredictable path that nonetheless fit under the bell curve of

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underlying stock. But he had the general drift right, and found that option prices on the Paris Bourse moved in the direction his formula indicated. Paul Samuelson was already thinking about options when he discovered Bachelier’s thesis in the mid-1950s, and he thought even harder about them after that. He

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got in only to MIT, the one place where his hard-science credentials counted for more than his utter lack of economics training, and took Paul Samuelson’s mathematical economics course his first semester there in 1967. Merton was smitten, and so was Samuelson, who hired the student as his research assistant

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in 1980. “At research seminars, people don’t take Keynesian theorizing seriously anymore; the audience starts to whisper and giggle to one another.”9 Even Paul Samuelson declared that if forced to choose between the “two extreme archetypes” of old-style Keynesianism and Lucas’s rational expectations, “I fear that the one

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statistical work came up with a dollar amount for the value of avoiding death. This approach is called “revealed preference,” and it was popularized by Paul Samuelson in the 1940s. Thaler couldn’t leave it at that. This was not an arcane technical matter, but life and death. He was curious, and

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confident the market could be wrong for long—unpredictably long—periods of time. That was a statement with which most economists of his generation, including Paul Samuelson and even Milton Friedman, would agree. None of these men devoted any of their serious scholarly work to fleshing out these ideas about financial market

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by this time, and he had acquired an equally brazen ally up Interstate 95 at Harvard, the precocious Lawrence Summers. As the nephew of both Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow, Summers had the most impressive pedigree of any economist, ever.19 Seen as the brightest star in the dazzling constellation of smart

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where the odds were better and the potential payoffs bigger. He devoted the summer of 1964 to reading up on the stock market. Just as Paul Samuelson had fifteen years before, he concluded that the securities with the most potential for an analytical mind like his were not stocks themselves but warrants

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. It never approached the success of its blackjack predecessor, but it did catch the attention of the economists and finance scholars working on options pricing. Paul Samuelson wrote a review likening the book to “astrology.”5 Not that this criticism bothered Thorp. “The book was what I expected it to be,” he

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believed it could take a while. Slowly, the academic finance guys began to catch on that maybe at least some of these moneymen were right. Paul Samuelson bought Berkshire shares, and called Buffett “as near to a genius as I have observed.” Bill Sharpe described him as “a three-sigma event,” a

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? But in the 1980s a few rational market types, believing themselves to be at least two-sigma events, began trying to beat the market themselves. PAUL SAMUELSON WAS, AS SO often, ahead of the crowd. In 1969, one of his former students—who had written his Ph.D. dissertation on The Dynamics

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ground of modern mathematical economic theories. Helped convince economists to adopt John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s expected utility theory. Robert Merton Student of Paul Samuelson at MIT who helped solve the option-pricing puzzle with Fischer Black and Myron Scholes and went on to devise a hypermathematical, hyperrational approach to

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Rubinstein Coauthor with Stephen Ross of the binomial option pricing model. Cofounder with Hayne Leland and John O’Brien of the portfolio insurance firm LOR. Paul Samuelson Greatest American economist of the second half of the twentieth century (although some might favor Kenneth Arrow or Milton Friedman). Finance was just a side

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”—that is, came up with simple but not always entirely rational solutions to his problems. Winner of the 1978 economics Nobel. Joseph Stiglitz Student of Paul Samuelson and Franco Modigliani who, influenced by the work of Kenneth Arrow, showed how the efficient market hypothesis could not be—in theory at least—entirely

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true. Co-winner of the 2001 economics Nobel. Lawrence Summers Nephew of Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow. Author of sharp critiques of efficient market finance in the 1980s and early 1990s who went on to be Secretary of Treasury

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Niskanen, Terrance Odean, John O’Brien, Charles Plott, S. J. Prais, Alfred Rappaport, Kenneth Reid, Jay Ritter, Richard Roll, Barr Rosenberg, Stephen Ross, Mark Rubinstein, Paul Samuelson, Myron Scholes, William Sharpe, Hersh Shefrin, Robert Shiller, Andrei Shleifer, Harindra de Silva, Rex Sinquefield, Meir Statman, Jeremy Stein, Joel Stern, Joseph Stiglitz, Lawrence Summers

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, attendees at the summer conferences, which ran from 1935 through 1940, included economists Ragnar Frisch, Trygve Haavelmo, Nicholas Kaldor, Oskar Lange, Wassily Leontief, Abba Lerner, Paul Samuelson, and Joseph Schumpeter; statistician-geneticist R. A. Fischer; statistical quality control pioneer Walter Shewhart; statisticians Corrado Gini (of “Gini coefficient” fame), Harold Hotelling, and Jacob

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Poundstone, Fortune’s Formula (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), esp. 192–97. 25. As recalled by Mark Rubinstein. CHAPTER 4: A RANDOM WALK FROM PAUL SAMUELSON TO PAUL SAMUELSON 1. Jürg Niehans, A History of Economic Theory: Classic Contributions 1720–1980 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). 2. Paul A. Samuelson, Economics: An

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Introductory Analysis (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948), 570, 573. 3. Michael Szenberg, Aron Gottesman, and Lall Ramrattan, Paul Samuelson: On Being an Economist (New York: Jorge Pinto Books, 2005), 85. 4. The student, Richard Kruizenga, was chiefly interested in describing the securities and sketching

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, “The Utility Analysis of Choices Involving Risk,” Journal of Political Economy (Aug. 1948): 279–304. 2. I am thinking in particular of the introduction to Paul Samuelson’s 1947 book, Foundations of Economic Analysis (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1983), cited in chapter 4, and of Tjalling Koopmans’s August

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C. Bogle, The First Index Mutual Fund: A History of Vanguard Index Trust and the Vanguard Index Strategy (Valley Forge, Pa.: Vanguard Group, 1997). 41. Paul Samuelson, “Coping Sensibly,” Newsweek, March 6, 1978, 88. 42. I’m referring mainly to the account in Roger Lowenstein’s Buffett: The Making of an American

Capital Ideas Evolving

by Peter L. Bernstein  · 3 May 2007

new way of thinking about the nature of financial markets, the theory of investing, and the role of an uncertain future in all investment decisions. Paul Samuelson has used colorful language to describe this process: “Markowitz-Sharpe-Tobin quadratic programming in terms of portfolio means and variances is a powerful approximation that

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Ideas by the proponents of Behavioral Finance—and especially on the idea of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. The next chapter describes the current views of Paul Samuelson, one of the great sages about market behavior and portfolio formation. Samuelson takes a dim view of efforts to outperform the returns of the market

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time horizons are much shorter, skilled investors often act so rapidly that they spoil the situation for one another as opportunities disappear almost instantly. As Paul Samuelson has put it, “No easy pickings, no sure-thing gains.” That is why Fuller & Thaler seek opportunity in the smaller-capitalizations. Pickings are easier and

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of their zest, none of their fascination with innovation, none of their sense of the compelling importance of the work they are doing. Except for Paul Samuelson (who is now over ninety years old and has earned the right to observe rather than act), all these men are occupied—and on occasion

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_c03.qxd 38 3/23/07 9:01 AM Page 38 THE THEORETICIANS equilibrium and toward the kinds of relationships and responses predicted by theory.*  Paul Samuelson is the theorist with the longest perspective. To interview him for this book, I went to visit with him in the same office where he

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out their betting on horse and dog racing, or buying lottery tickets, or attending bingo sessions.” And * On a personal note, I f irst met Paul Samuelson about the time this paper appeared. Then in his early twenties, Samuelson had already made his reputation by having published more papers than he was

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the end of 2000. Boom-and-bust is not part of Capital Ideas, but Capital Ideas are still a part of Shiller’s analytical framework. Paul Samuelson’s handiwork runs through it all. bern_c03.qxd 3/23/07 9:01 AM Page 44 bern_c04.qxd 3/23/07 9:02

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of the Cowles Foundation at Yale looks much too young to have earned his Ph.D. at MIT over thirty years ago, while working with Paul Samuelson and Franco Modigliani. During those thirty years, he has managed to publish over 200 papers and five books, including the worldwide best seller, Irrational Exuberance

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. bern_c06.qxd 3/23/07 9:03 AM Page 73 Robert Shiller 73 The motivation for Shiller’s analysis was a view expressed by Paul Samuelson some years ago in a letter to Shiller and cited by Shiller in the second edition of his Irrational Exuberance (p. 243):5 Modern markets

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-acquainted with major institutional investors addicted to short-term opportunities and fearful and impatient when offered investments that take longer to pay off. Echoing what Paul Samuelson has to say on this subject, Grantham explained this bias in a letter to his clients, “Very long time horizons are fine in theory, but

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idiots,” he argues, “but they are a long way from hyperrational automatons.” bern_bins.qxd 3/23/07 10:44 AM Page 2 In 1969, Paul Samuelson won the first Nobel Prize in Economics. In Capital Ideas, he describes the stock market as “no easy pickings.” He goes even further today: “A

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market

by Nicholas Wapshott  · 2 Aug 2021  · 453pp  · 122,586 words

.Capitalism Teeters ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX SAMUELSON FRIEDMAN 1 The Land of Oz Newsweek changes hands and the new editor, eager for controversy, pits Paul Samuelson against Milton Friedman. As stagflation bites, Keynesianism is put to the test Vincent Astor,1 the reclusive head of the American branch of the New

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humble beginnings in Gary, Indiana, Samuelson’s precocious ability at math leads him to be taught by the free-market economists of the Chicago School Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman were similar in many ways. Both were born Jewish, both married fellow members of their university class, both achieved their first degrees

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significant: in the fall of 1932, in the recently completed Social Science Research Building at the University of Chicago, he met for the first time Paul Samuelson, who, although three years younger, was, thanks to his precocity, a year above Friedman at Chicago. Friedman had been made aware of Samuelson’s evident

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noted by Newsweek editor Osborn Elliott, who was looking for a lively, argumentative, provocative conservative economist to counter the views of his new Keynesian hire, Paul Samuelson. And so it was that Friedman entered the ring with Samuelson to continue an intellectual duel that had begun in England in 1931 between Keynes

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. “The layman has a vision of economists as a quarrelsome tribe who never agree,” wrote Friedman. There is an element of validity in this vision. Paul Samuelson and I, for example, disagree frequently, strongly and publicly on matters of public policy. … Disagreement among economists on public policy seldom reflects a difference in

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smart enough to apply his monetarist fix for Inflation. But Nixon was only interested in reelection When asked to join John F. Kennedy’s administration, Paul Samuelson had politely declined the invitation, preferring to keep a distance from government and concentrate upon maintaining the place he had carved for himself as America

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, avoiding the big picture argument and concentrating instead on Samuelson’s suggestion that Friedman’s predictions were always too pessimistic. “I cannot justify or excuse Paul Samuelson’s masochistic instincts,” Friedman told the committee, “but I would like to correct his statement about my predictions. It so happens that his statement is

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Rose Friedman recalled that when the first Nobel for economics was mooted, “two names appeared in every newspaper story or conversation about the coming award—Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman.” When there was speculation about who would win the second economics Nobel, Rose Friedman recalled, “the two names most often mentioned remained

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. Friedman opened his Newsweek column in November 1970 with a paean of praise to his old friend and opponent. “The readers of this space know Paul Samuelson as a witty, informed and often acerbic commentator on current affairs, as a ‘liberal’ supporter of the economic policies of the Kennedy and Johnson years

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“in sharp contrast to the favorable comments on the Soviet Union at about the same time by such prominent intellectuals as John Kenneth Galbraith and Paul Samuelson.”65 As he had argued in Capitalism and Freedom, “The great tragedy of the drive to centralization, as of the drive to extend the scope

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greater reliance on individual responsibility” and “one of the 20th century’s leading economic scholars, on a par with giants like John Maynard Keynes and Paul Samuelson.”15 Sam Brittan, in the Financial Times, paid tribute to Friedman’s bluntness and nerve. “Part of his appeal lay in his willingness to come

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a sea of progressives on Stanford’s campus that had welcomed him as a towering figure in conservative/libertarian economics after his retirement from Chicago. PAUL SAMUELSON died at his home in Belmont, Massachusetts, on December 13, 2009, aged ninety-four. He had been suffering from high blood pressure for years and

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the debate ever since. Forty years after Keynes and Hayek reached an uneasy truce, the argument was still going on, but with two new champions, Paul Samuelson, from MIT, and Milton Friedman, from the University of Chicago. For this story of the lifelong friendship and disagreements between these two towering figures, I

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the text are mine and mine alone. Grateful thanks are due, too, to John Aslet for his research. A special thank you is due to Paul Samuelson’s stepdaughter, Jane Samuelson; his son, William Samuelson; and Milton Friedman’s daughter, Janet Martel, for allowing me to quote from their fathers’ correspondence and

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. Barnett, University of Kansas, December 23, 2003. 2.Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 150 Oral History project, July 19, 2007. https://infinitehistory.mit.edu/video/paul-samuelson. 3.As first cousins, they were obliged to move from Chicago, where the marriage of first cousins was illegal, first to Wisconsin, then Indiana, where

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it wasn’t. 4.MIT 150 Oral History project, July 19, 2007. https://infinitehistory.mit.edu/video/paul-samuelson. 5.Ibid. 6.MIT150 Oral History project. https://infinitehistory.mit.edu/video/paul-samuelson. 7.Karen Ilse Horn, Roads to Wisdom, Conversations with Ten Nobel Laureates in Economics (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, England, 2009

…

), p. 43. 8.MIT150 Oral History project. https://infinitehistory.mit.edu/video/paul-samuelson. 9.Ibid. 10.His father owned a set of Harvard Classics—the most important books in the Western canon—included one of the founding works

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, 1766–December 29, 1834), English cleric who studied the influence of demographics on economics. 12.MIT 150 Oral History project. https://infinitehistory.mit.edu/video/paul-samuelson. 13.Aaron Director (September 21, 1901–September 11, 2004), a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who played a central role in the

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opinions he did not agree with, simply to “fruitfully” counter Friedman’s right-wing views. 22.MIT Oral History project. https://infinitehistory.mit.edu/video/paul-samuelson. 23.Obituary of Samuelson, New York Times, December 14, 2009. 24.Horn, Roads to Wisdom, p. 47. 25.David C. Colander and Harry Landreth, The

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the 1930s and popularizing the ideas in Keynes’s The General Theory. 32.MIT Oral History project, July 19, 2007. https://infinitehistory.mit.edu/video/paul-samuelson. 33.Paul A. Samuelson and William A. Barnett (eds.), Inside the Economist’s Mind: The History of Modern Economic Thought, as Explained by Those Who

…

.Edwin Bidwell Wilson (April 25, 1879–December 28, 1964), Yale and Harvard mathematician and polymath. 38.MIT Oral History project. https://infinitehistory.mit.edu/video/paul-samuelson. 39.Ibid. 40.Ibid. 41.Lorie Tarshis (March 22, 1911–October 4, 1993). For a full account of the incident, see http://community.middlebury.edu

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Enchanted Forest,” New York Times, October 12, 1986. 45.Samuelson, Nobel Economists Lecture Series, Trinity University, San Antonio, February 1985. 46.David Warsh, “The Rivals: Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman arrive at the University of Chicago in 1932,” Economic Principals blog, July 12, 2015. http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2015.07.12

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1956; U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union; and U.S. ambassador to Britain. 50.MIT 150 Oral History project. https://infinitehistory.mit.edu/video/paul-samuelson. 51.Walt Whitman Rostow, aka Walt Rostow or W. W. Rostow (October 7, 1916–February 13, 2003), American economist and political theorist who helped formulate

…

. 54.Ibid. 55.Quoted in New York Times obituary of Samuelson, December 14, 2009. 56.MIT 150 Oral History project. https://infinitehistory.mit.edu/video/paul-samuelson 57.Samuelson said at a talk at Claremont Graduate University, Calif., in January 1991 that he had been advised to float the dollar by Nicholas

…

, helped Hayek with his use of English in the duel-by-learned-journal against Keynes. 58.MIT Oral History project. https://infinitehistory.mit.edu/video/paul-samuelson. file:///Users/nicholaswapshott/Downloads/Paul%20A.%20Samuelson.pdf. 59.Lawrence Henry “Larry” Summers (November 30, 1954–), whose father, Robert Summers, (who changed his name from

…

Samuelson to Summers) is Paul Samuelson’s brother. President Emeritus and Charles W. Eliot University Professor of Harvard University. Former chief economist of the World Bank (1991–1993); Undersecretary of the

…

II. It was presided over and adjudicated by Keynes. 58.Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, p. 248. 59.Ibid., p. 249. 60.Rupert Cornwell, “Paul Samuelson: Nobel Prize-winner widely regarded as the most important economist of the 20th century,” The Independent, December 16, 2009. 61.Conor Clarke, “An Interview with

…

Paul Samuelson,” The Atlantic, June 17, 2009. 62.Michael M. Weinstein, “Paul A. Samuelson, Economist, Dies at 94,” New York Times, December 13, 2009. 63.John Cassidy

…

Samuelson by William A. Barnett, University of Kansas, December 23, 2003. 4.Friedman, Newsweek, November 9, 1970, p. 80. http://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/objects/56682/paul-samuelson?ctx=e20bfa6d-28ba-45c5-af74-e7802e94570f&idx=19. 5.Samuelson, The Samuelson Sampler, p. vii. 6.Ibid., November 1967, p. 39. 7.Ibid., January 1967

…

of the Counter-Establishment, p. 89. 19.John Davenport, “The Radical Economics of Milton Friedman,” Fortune, June 1, 1967. 20.Conor Clarke, “An Interview with Paul Samuelson,” The Atlantic, June 17, 2009. 21.Robert Merton Solow (August 23, 1924–), 1987 Nobel Prize–winning economist and MIT professor since 1949. 22.Solow quoted

…

newly rich to save compared to greater saving by the “old moneyed” who had enjoyed wealth for a long time. 10.Ibid., p. 272. 11.Paul Samuelson, contribution to a 1958 symposium sponsored by the Committee for Economic Development. 12.Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, p. 341. 13.Time, December 31

…

, May 17, 1966. Hoover Institution Friedman archive. 17.Letter from Friedman to Samuelson, May 11, 1987. Duke Samuelson archive. 18.Mark Skousen, “The Perseverance of Paul Samuelson’s Economics,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 11, no. 2, Spring 1997, pp. 137–52. 19.Interview with Friedman, quoted in Mark Skousen, “My Friendly

…

for suggesting that Samuelson had coined the word. “[Krugman] erroneously suggests that the term ‘stagflation,’ which originated in the UK in 1965, was coined by Paul Samuelson after 1967,” she wrote in a March 29, 2007 response to Krugman’s “Who Was Milton Friedman?” in the New York Review of Books, February

…

enemy list it raised the prestige of myself within my own family and in my circle.” MIT 150 Oral History. https://infinitehistory.mit.edu/video/paul-samuelson. 44.“How the Slump Looks to Three Experts” Newsweek, May 25, 1970, pp. 78–79. 45.Samuelson, “Coping with Stagflation,” Newsweek, August 19, 1974. 46

…

Friedman, Two Lucky People, p. 591. 12.Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, p. 400. 13.MIT 150 Oral History. https://infinitehistory.mit.edu/video/paul-samuelson. 14.Nobel Prize Paul A. Samuelson Facts. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1970/samuelson/facts/. 15.Quoted in Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky

…

, 2006. 33.Ibid. 34.“Milton Friedman: Why the Euro is a Big Mistake,” Scotland on Sunday, August 18, 2002. 35.Conor Clarke, “An Interview with Paul Samuelson,” The Atlantic, June 17, 2009. 36.Letter from Samuelson to Benjamin M. Friedman, March 10, 2008. Duke Samuelson archive. CHAPTER 16: ALL GOING SWIMMINGLY 1

…

National Economists Club, Washington, D.C., November 21, 2002. https://www.federalreserve.gov/boardDocs/speeches/2002/20021121/default.htm. 5.Conor Clarke, “An interview with Paul Samuelson,” The Atlantic, June 17, 2009. 6.Interview with Samuelson, Wall Street Journal, March 2009. 7.Interview with Samuelson by William A. Barnett, University of Kansas

…

, vol. 31, no. 3, Fall 2011. 26.Samuelson, “Economic Policy is an Art,” New York Times, October 30, 1970. 27.Conor Clarke, “An Interview with Paul Samuelson,” The Atlantic, June 17, 2009. 28.Letter from Samuelson to Robin McElheny, associate director of the Harvard University Archives, November 9, 2006. Duke Samuelson archive

…

to Robert L. Byrd, December 14 2005. Duke Samuelson archive. 36.Michael M. Weinstein, Samuelson obituary, New York Times, December 13, 2009. 37.Paul Krugman, “Paul Samuelson, RIP,” New York Times, December 13, 2009. 38.The Economist, December 17, 2009. 39.Obituary, Daily Telegraph, December 14, 2009. 40.Chinese statistics, particularly economic

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