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An announcement from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology informs us that Paul A. Samuelson died on Sunday, December 13, 2009, at the age of 94. The announcement also gives a good account of why Samuelson was for more than half a century a towering figure in the economics profession and, to some degree, in the wider world. Although my one personal encounter with Samuelson was brief and not altogether pleasant, I was greatly affected by his influence on economics. In the 1960s, when I was being trained in economics, he was generally regarded as the greatest living economist, and his...

BOSTON (Reuters) – Paul Samuelson, whose work helped form the basis of modern economics, died on Sunday in his home in Belmont, Massachusetts, after a brief illness. He was 94. > Among MIT's prominent alumni are Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke, Nobel laureate New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and Christina Romer, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. >

For only $99,000,000,000,000.99 we'll supersize that for you!Robert Samuelson, economic journalist extraordinaire, writes:WASHINGTON -- The question that President Obama ought to be asking -- that we all should be asking -- is this: How big a government do we want? Without anyone much noticing, our national government is on the verge of a permanent expansion that would endure long after the present economic crisis has (presumably) passed and that would exceed anything ever experienced in peacetime. This expansion may not be good for us, but we are not contemplating the adverse consequences or how we might minimize them.How to Fight...

WASHINGTON -- Raised in an individualistic culture, Americans dislike the concept of the "welfare state" and do not use the term. But make no mistake, the United States has a welfare state, and its future is precarious. The true significance of General Motors' bankruptcy lies more with this welfare state than with the battered condition of American capitalism. Broadly speaking, the U.S. welfare system divides into two parts -- the private, run by firms; and the public, provided by government. Both are besieged: private companies by competitive pressures; government by rising debt and taxes. GM exemplified the large corporation as...

Raised in an individualistic culture, Americans dislike the concept of the "welfare state" and do not use the term. But make no mistake, the United States has a welfare state, and its future is precarious. The true significance of General Motors' bankruptcy lies more with this welfare state than with the battered condition of American capitalism. Broadly speaking, the U.S. welfare system divides into two parts -- the private, run by firms; and the public, provided by government. Both are besieged: private companies by competitive pressures; government by rising debt and taxes. GM exemplified the large corporation as private welfare...

The actual title of Robert J. Samuelson's column in today's Washington Post is A Full Tank of Hypocrisy, but the teaser headline for it on the online op-ed home page is "The Case for Gouging."Samuelson in fact disputes that gouging, in the sense of collusion among oil producers/refiners, is taking place. He points out, for example, that concentration of ownership in the oil industry has been deemed low-to-moderate, "less concentrated than the auto industry, which is considered intensely competitive." But the long-time WaPo columnist does make the case than many politicians in the global-warming crowd are engaging in some have-it-both-ways...

<p>WASHINGTON -- If you're in Asheville, N.C., stop by the Biltmore, the vast estate that George Vanderbilt III -- heir to a railroad fortune -- constructed between 1889 and 1895. You can tour most of its 250 rooms, including 43 bathrooms and an indoor swimming pool. When few Americans used electricity, the Biltmore had its own generators. To take the tour is to grasp one of the great advances of the 20th century: The gap between the superrich and most Americans has narrowed enormously. In Vanderbilt's time, most Americans lived in filthy slums or on modest farms. Now even the wealthiest among us live more like ordinary people than Vanderbilt ever did.</p>

Immigration is crawling its way back onto the national agenda -- and not just as a footnote to keeping terrorists out. This year Congress enacted a law intended to prevent illegal immigrants from getting state driver's licenses; the volunteer "minutemen" who recently patrolled the porous Arizona border with Mexico attracted huge attention, and members of Congress from both parties are crafting proposals to deal with illegal immigration. All this is good. But unless we're brutally candid with ourselves, it won't amount to much. Being brutally candid means recognizing that the huge and largely uncontrolled flow of unskilled Latino workers into...

For decades economists have insisted that the U.S. wins from globalization. Now they're not so sure But the bulk of this work is labor-intensive and lower skilled and can be done more efficiently by countries that have an abundance of less-educated workers. in the long run a more disruptive trend may be the fast-rising tide of white-collar jobs shifting to cheap-labor countries. "...nobody has a clue about what the numbers are," says Robert C. Feenstra, [UC-Davis] -- competition is coming on in the products such as software. If the new competition drives down prices too much, U.S. export earnings will...

With markets at last recovering from the turn-of-the-century crash and the attacks of September 11, it is an opportune time to debate America's future in a rapidly changing world economy. America's establishment of liberal economists and media pundits, however, are joining in a cramped new nationalism that jeopardizes the future of American technology and prosperity. Like reactionary jingoes of the past, they are priming John Kerry with the delusional view that the U.S. and its workers are somehow victims of global trade and capital movements.... In a popular image, "Benedict Arnold CEOs" are seen to be offshoring factories and outsourcing...

For those of you who don't have the time or the inclination to read Mona Charen's excellent book, Useful Idiots, yes, the book I recommended to you in this space a couple of weeks ago, you can take the short course: read Arnold Beichman's succinct essay on the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Josef Vissarionovich Stalin. Mr. Beichman covers those useful idiots who could not or would not see the enormity of the famine deliberately caused in the Soviet Union in 1932-1933, somewhere around 5,000,000 lives. Walter Duranty reported it falsely to his useful idiot bosses at the New...