Generalists' Generalisimo.

Baumol, William J.

Quite evidently, Paul Samuelson is the member of our profession who is most deserving of praise but least in need of it. This note, however, is not intended as a generalized panegyric, but rather is particularized by focusing on the generally of his contribution. For he is clearly our prime generalist, a position by which he is deservedly pleased, and in which those few of us who remain dedicated to that direction are more than content to attempt to follow his lead.

But before turning to my central point here, it may be appropriate for me to offer some remarks on how things were when he was starting out. For this I am qualified by longevity, having entered the field in this respect, as in others, substantially behind Paul, though having watched us grow ever closer in age as time passed on.

Of course, everyone knows that when Paul embarked on his career the great depression was still very much under way, and certainly it had not become that bizarre incident in ancient history it is to those few of today's undergraduates who are aware of it at all. He had graduated from the University of Chicago in 1936, the year of Franklin Roosevelt's first reelection, well before the second major downturn of the U.S. economy in that depressed period. At that time, any job at all for the holder of a new bachelor's degree was a minor miracle. Even six years later, when I received my first job, my fellow ex-students considered me mad when I held out for $2000 a year--and got it. Five years after that, when I entered the LSE as a student, as I remember it, tuition was in the neighborhood of $100 per year. Of course, the dollar bought much more then, but not that much more.

All this brings us just a bit closer to discussion of Samuelson's work. The preceding remarks should remind us why at the time the one hot topic for our discipline was Keynesian economics. The great depression was hardly yet a distant memory, and there was widespread fear that the end of the war and the return of its veterans to the civilian labor force would lead to a resumption of massive unemployment. The ex vice president, Henry Wallace was espousing the scarcely credible goal of 50 million jobs (a number evidently long since far surpassed). It should not be surprising, then, that much of the attention that Samuelson's early work attracted was that dealing with macro issues, consumption, investment and the business cycle.

Yet in microeconomics and in the macro arena, too, another change was stirring. The use of mathematics as a tool of economic analysis, as we all know, has a long and distinguished history, beginning largely in primitive form well before Cournot's 1838 great work. But this sort of analysis was still widely considered a pathological manifestation produced by suspect deviants. It was a time when statistics seminars used calculators in which it was required to turn a crank by hand throughout the operations, and PhD students of limited ability, rather than fleshing out their theses with masses of printout, resorted to interminable footnotes describing every marginally pertinent predecessor for every assertion in their texts. It was not uncommon, in this era for someone who wrote a mathematical article to begin with an apologetic footnote explaining the author's awareness that human psychology was complex and that behavior was not driven to follow unerringly the dictates of any simple algebraic equation. Times have indeed changed, and the change is attributable in no small degree to Samuelson's contributions, though the skeptic may perhaps be moved to point out that many subsequent writers in mathematical economics have followed Paul in form but hardly in substance.

Having indulged myself it such nostalgia, a personal word may be admissible here. This is hardly my first venture in praise of Samuelson. My earliest entry in this field goes back almost exactly half a century, when I had attained the exalted position of assistant lecturer at the London School of Economics. The editors of the journal Economica had proposed to foist off on me the review of a book that, at best, was unlikely to garner much attention in the UK and in a field about which I knew little if anything. But word had reached the LSE that a work of great depth and originality, with the imposing title, Foundations of Economic Analysis, had just made its appearance. I proposed a bargain to the Journal editors--I would agree to review their choice if they would let me review mine. To my surprise and delight, they accepted, and I had my first opportunity to express my unqualified admiration of his contribution. This was more than half a century ago, in that great vintage year, 1947. I will digress only just a bit more. As Paul recently reminded me, not long afterwards he came to the LSE for a visit, and I inveigled him to climb the four flights to the (not centrally heated) flat we occupied and, as I recall, we were joined by Frankie and Dorothy Hahn for as good a dinner as food shortages permitted, accompanied by conversation of three star quality.

Let me turn, at last, to the main subject of this note, Paul Samuelson as the very model of a major modern generalist. Perhaps the most striking attribute of his work, from its very beginnings, is the astonishingly broad range of fields it encompasses. For who can approach Paul Samuelson as leading and path-breaking contributor to so many fields in our discipline? Usually, our colleagues aspire to produce something memorable in one arena or two. Surely, there is no one who would dare to challenge Paul in his ability to conquer, Alexander-like, so much of our known world and so thoroughly. Theory of value, international trade, macroeconomics, welfare economics, public finance and much more--the list seems interminable. This, then, is my main theme here--that the true generalist is different from others, is uniquely valuable and that no one can approach, much less hope to outdo Paul at this endeavor. And Paul surely is one generalist who has managed to achieve the profundity of the persistent specialist in any arena he has visited. This he has done while preserving the broadness of vision that overspecialization so often undermines.

All too often the role of generalist does have its shortcomings. Even the fabled da Vinci paid his price in the form of frequent inability to bring his projects to completion. More often the cost is a sacrifice of profundity by the generalist, who is apt to be unprepared to probe any subject to the depth attained by the leading specialists. Here, in particular, it is clear that Paul has escaped this peril and more. His contributions to the many sub-fields of our discipline in which he has worked have not merely been profound. Much more than that, they have often led to major upheavals that have sharply changed their directions. And he has done so as effectively when changing the course of macroeconomic writings, as when creating upheaval in the work of the microeconomists.

Already, early in his career, he showed, with elegant simplicity how the Keynesian apparatus can be incorporated into a formal working model of inter-temporal behavior of the macro economy. The new approach at once proved to be an irresistible lure to many others who were working in the field. Difference and differential equation models became the fashion, their simplicity, easy intuitive grasp and strong conclusion proving hard to resist.

Microtheory also underwent a series of injections of power and elegance at his hands. For example, his revealed preference analysis, with its (perhaps somewhat deceptively) transparent premise, permitted pages of clumsy determinants to be collapsed into straightforward and elementary steps, with the previously recognized implications preserved alongside new and significant insights on subjects such as index numbers that might well have appeared to be only distantly related.

The same obviously transpired in other arenas. Like Schumpeter's entrepreneur, Paul managed to create upheaval in each of the sub-fields he touched. Who today would prepare a volume dealing with public goods and not start off with Samuelson's analysis? Who else has made as great a variety of profound contributions to so broad a variety of fields, including his work on integrability of utility, his additions to welfare theory, his contributions on dynamic stability of general equilibrium, his envelope theorem and the cost function, his correspondence principle and its illumination of the arenas of comparative statics and dynamics, his illuminating non-substitution theorems. What writings on the theory of international trade would leave his contributions out of account? And his significant contributions in these many arenas continue. Only a few months ago he returned to trade theory and joined in showing that some of our most eminent contributors to the field had fallen asleep at the switch in their over-sanguine evaluation of the consequences of outsourcing.

His spectacularly successful elementary textbook, unlike other textbooks, was revolutionary and a revolutionary work that only a very capable generalist could have carried out, all by himself. No textbook in that mold and with that authority had been seen before, and no leading textbook ever since, including that of which I am coauthor, has failed to follow his approaches to the teaching of our subject to the neophytes,

That Paul is a generalist is beyond question. But evidently he is also no mere garden-variety member of that group. The curse of the generalist is the likelihood of emerging as a jack of all trades and a master of none. But it is surely evident that Paul has beaten this threat and, indeed reached the opposite extreme--he has indeed ventured into all of our trades, and mastered them all to a degree that none of them could ever be quite the same again.

Moreover, via his role as a generalist Paul has been in a position to make valuable contributions that escape the overspecialized. The latter all too often deploy their powerful weapons to aim at narrow targets of limited importance, while the generalists, with their less restricted view, can be in a better position to judge pertinence, significance and context. This, undoubtedly, helps to account for Paul's wholly justified pride in his position as generalist. To build on one of the many mots of his friend and enduring colleague, Bob Solow, Paul, unlike most others has succeeded in bigthink activities without giving up the craftsmanship and rigor of the best workers in the fields of littlethink.

Unfortunately, he is probably right in his observation that the ranks of the generalists are thinning. Littlethink is a seductive enterprise, and most of our students and colleagues succumb to its lure. But it indisputably remains true that, whatever their prospects, the generalists are fortunate to have at their head one of themselves of exemplary ability, productivity and judgment.

William J. Baumol, New York University and Princeton University.