Paul Samuelson has died

This from the New York Times.

Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94.

"the foremost academic economist of the 20th century" may be going a bit far, given the likes of Keynes or Friedman, depending on our point of view.

Samuelson was properly best known to most people for his textbook,

Mr. Samuelson wrote one of the most widely used college textbooks in the history of American education. The book, “Economics,” first published in 1948, was the nation’s best-selling textbook for nearly 30 years. Translated into 20 languages, it was selling 50,000 copies a year a half century after it first appeared.

In the 13th edition of Economics Samuealson offered up this assertion:

"[T]he Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and thrive."

13 does seem to have been unlucky.