Monday’s New York Times carried a front-page obituary on Paul Samuelson, described as “the foremost academic economist of the 20th century.” Within a few paragraphs, reporter Michael Weinstein also found a way to tout the brilliance of a certain Times columnist on economics:
Mr. Samuelson attracted a brilliant roster of economists to teach or study at the university, among them Mr. [Robert] Solow as well as others who would go on to become Nobel laureates like George A. Akerlof, Robert F. Engle III, Lawrence R. Klein, Paul Krugman, Franco Modigliani, Robert C. Merton and Joseph E. Stiglitz.
Weinstein also insisted that somehow, we’re still all Keynesians like Samuelson now:
Many economics students would never again rest comfortably with the 19th-century view that private markets would cure unemployment without need of government intervention. That lesson was reinforced in 2008, when the international economy slipped into the steepest downturn since the Great Depression, when Keynesian economics was born.