Paul A. Samuelson

There are no prizes for guessing who my favourite economist is — yes, of course, it is my brilliant parrot Maynard. But my favourite economics textbook when I was at school was by someone very different.

The book was simply called Economics, and it had four vertical stripes on the cover: one green, one blue, one red and one black. The book cost £4.80, quite a sum at the time (1975). The paper was very thin, but the book was full of fascinating colour graphs and diagrams. I have it on my desk as I am writing this.

The book that I learned economics from was the ninth edition, which had been published in 1973. It is described on the cover as the "International Student Edition". The first edition — which I also now own a copy of — came out in 1948.

The author is described simply as "Institute Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology". His name is given as Samuelson, Paul Anthony, 1915–.

That final date was added on 13 December 2009, when Paul A. Samuelson died, at the age of 94. He is rightly regarded as one of the greatest economists of the 20th Century and won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics in 1970, the second time it was awarded.

Samuelson gave economics a mathematical rigour and contributed many seminal papers in areas such as growth theory, finance and international trade. He was also an economic adviser to John F. Kennedy. For an excellent obituary, from the The New York Times, see here.

Via his best-selling textbook, Samuelson introduced millions of students, such as myself, to the ideas of British economist John Maynard Keynes, after whom my brilliant parrot is named. We are all in Samuelson's debt.