萨缪尔逊去世了，享年94岁。对一个终生以研究经济学为乐趣、著作等身、一生顺遂的经济学大师来说，以如此高龄安详离世可谓是功德圆满。对于活着的人来说，也是怀念多于哀思。

他在经济学史上的功绩地位，过去有很多评价、今天和未来仍会有很多人去重新分析和评价。作为一个普通的中国人，作为受益于他的著作和他的智慧的一个经济学爱好者，对于萨缪尔逊先生，长久以来我内心更多的是一种感激，对于他的离去，更多的是一种淡淡的不舍。

绝大多数中国人对于先生的了解，是从他的那本创造了出版史奇迹的《经济学》教科书开始的。这是一本经济学入门教科书，它至少在三个方面树立了高峰，后人很可能在很长时间内都难以跨越。

首先，它以初级教科书的方式奠定了一个理论体系的框架。宏观微观上下两册，凯恩斯统治着宏观，瓦尔拉斯等人统治着微观。作为常态的一般均衡完美境界与作为就业不足的非常态的凯恩斯世界互为补充，构成了一个解释经济运行的基础逻辑框架——新古典综合。这个框架，代表了凯恩斯革命以后，积极修补新势力与传统之间裂痕努力的最重要成果，好几代人都是在这个框架内成长起来的。

尽管新古典综合学派早已云散，当今经济学界新凯恩斯主义和新古典宏观经济学两大阵营取代了萨缪尔逊的那个综合，但在分化、革命、综合相互交织的经济学史上，新古典综合起到了承上启下的作用，为后来的学术发展作出了不可缺少的贡献。

其次，它彻底颠覆了人们对经济学教科书定义。不管是18世纪亚当·斯密的《国富论》、19世纪中期斯图加特·穆勒的《政治经济学原理》，还是更晚近一些的马歇尔的《经济学原理》，都曾充当过教科书的角色，但从本质上看，它们不是写给普通人看的，而是面向研究经济学的小圈子。只有到了萨缪尔逊，才真正出现了影响力极大的面向普通人的入门经济学的教科书。

在西方流传着这样一个说法，一个经济学家要经历三个阶段才能算是臻于至善。第一步是取得名校的博士学位；第二步是在专业刊物上发表论文并被大量引用；第三步是写一部教科书（并且是初级教科书），并被大量高校选用。以这个标准看，萨缪尔逊显然为数不多的功德圆满者，并且在三十多岁就臻于此境。

第三，《经济学》一书伟大的文学成就彻底打破了“经济学是一门沉闷的科学”这个断言。在我看来，这本书的文学成就足以称得上伟大。多少年过去了，第一次读到那些妙趣横生而又入木三分的格言引语和对经济原理行云流水般解释时的那种愉悦、兴奋仍仿佛是昨日的体验。历史上，并不乏文笔一流的经济学家，比如凯恩斯的幽默、辛辣和善辩就常为人们所称道，但这些人的写作绝大多数面向知识精英。能让普罗大众也能感到经济学趣味，能让一个初生学生就能沐浴到经济学思维给人带来的智慧快乐，《经济学》一书是第一人。它的影响之大前无古人，并且我相信有相当大的可能是后无来者。

对于中国人来说，上述第二和第三方面的成就显得更有价值。从本质上说，经济学是一门“西学”，如果没有萨缪尔逊的贡献，这门艰深的西学，绝没有现在传播得这么快、这么广。在很长时间和很大范围内，编写教科书都是创造力欠缺者的无奈选择，是学术低能者证明自己价值的地方，而教科书也似乎天经地义就该枯燥乏味。萨缪尔逊的成就彻底颠覆了人们的传统观念，也为中国学校教育、教科书编写等问题树立了一个重要的参照。有了这个参照，我们才得以批评、努力和期待。

作为一个普通的经济学爱好者，我无能力去评价萨缪尔逊的学术成就。但先生“最后一个集大成者”的自言，我是相信的。先生的学术成就横跨宏观、微观、国际贸易、财政各领域，极大地推动了经济学的数理化，对经济学动态化和计量方法的引入也起到了重要的奠基作用。尽管我始终难以读懂那本《经济分析基础》，也无法理解他的其它很多重要思想的全貌，但这并不妨碍我受惠于他提出的一些重要模型，比如，特定要素模型对理解国际贸易对收入分配的影响，巴拉萨-萨缪尔逊效应对当前人民币汇率的理解，都是非常基础非常关键的，每每思考此类问题时，便不得不借助这些基本原理，偶尔欣欣然自觉有所得时，心中就产生一种对先生智慧的感激。

先生的智慧和风采影响之大，足以与历史上的大哲学家、大思想家相媲美，即便在远离重洋的中国，受益于先生的人也多不胜数，但愿先生在天国里永生。

How I Became an Economist

by Paul A. Samuelson          5 September 2003

From one point of view my studying economics was the result of accidental blind chance. Prior to graduating from high school I was born again at 8:00 a.m., January 2, 1932, when I first walked into the University of Chicago lecture hall. That day's lecture was on Malthus's theory that human populations would reproduce like rabbits until their density per acre of land reduced their wage to a bare subsistence level where an increased death rate came to equal the birth rate. So easy was it to understand all this simple differential equation stuff that I suspected (wrongly) that I was missing out on some mysterious complexity.

Luck? Yes. And all my life I have been at the right place at the right time. Chicago was at that period the top center for old-fashioned neoclassical micro-economic study. But I didn't know that; my reason for entering there was simply because the University of Chicago was close to my high school and home. Later when I was bribed to leave the Eden of the Chicago womb, choice boiled down to either the Harvard or the Columbia Graduate School. My revered Chicago mentors--Frank Knight, Jacob Viner, Henry Simons, Paul Douglas, ...--without exception said, "Pick Columbia." Never one to blindly accept adult advice, I picked Harvard. I picked it by miscalculation, expecting that it would be a little oasis on rolling green hills.

Thanks in part to the evils of Adolph Hitler, my 1935-40 sojourn at Harvard coincided with its economics renaissance under Joseph Schumpeter, Wassily Leontief, Gottfried Haberler, and the "American Keynes" Alvin Hansen. (Also, for me, I was able to become the sole protegé of the polymath Edwin Bidwell Wilson, who had himself been the sole protegé of Yale's great physicist Willard Gibbs.) Contemporary Harvard graduate students came to match in brilliance the new Harvard faculty. Richard Musgrave, Wolfgang Stolper, Abram Bergson, Joe Bain, Lloyd Metzler, Richard Goodwin, Robert Triffin, James Tobin, Robert Solow,... --all of them my pals--became the 1950-2000 era stars in world frontier economics. Harvard made us, yes. But as I have written many times, we made Harvard.

The Duke of Wellington said, "The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton." I can say, "World War II was won in the seminar rooms of Cambridge, Princeton, and Los Alamos."

Perhaps more important than the causal role of casual luck was the salutary fact that economics was just right for me. This field was then entering a mathematical phase in both theory and statistics. As a precocious youngster I had always been good at logical manipulations and puzzle-solving IQ tests. So if economics was made for me, it can be said that I too was made for economics. Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play. This turns possible underachievers into happy warriors.

1932 was the bottom point of the Great Depression. That was a good time to be not yet in the labor market. Just when I had completed my advanced training, World War II came, followed by fifty years of exploding college economics enrollments. My generation had a strong wind at its back. My famous teachers had become full professors only after 40. Wunderkinds in my generation could become anointed before age 30. Outside the Ivory Tower, economists were sought out by governments, corporations, Wall Street traders, and textbook publishers.

One comes to understand the importance of biography in a scholar's research contributions. Before university, I never opened the copy of Adam Smith on my father's bookshelf. But I did experience first hand, in my virtual infancy, the disappearance of the horse economy, the arrival of indoor plumbing and electric lighting. After that radio waves through the air or TV pictures left one blasé.

More important it was to see with my own eyes the First War's induced boom in the U.S. Steel-planned Gary, Indiana: East European workers were overjoyed to be able to work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. I saw, too, and my family learned the hard way, how recession follows the boom the way sparrows used to follow the horse. Also, when I was age 10 and we lived in Miami Beach, Florida, I experienced first hand what a real estate mania was like. And what it was like when the bubble burst.

All that prepared me for the Great Depression and for post-war inflations. My Chicago-trained mind resisted tenaciously the Keynesian revolution; but reason won out over tradition and dogma.

So after all, as I look back in my ninth decade over my long career in economics, I realize that all those incidents of good luck have to be understood against the background of fundamental trends in economic history. Mine has been a grandstand seat from which to observe most of a century of basic economic history. Bliss it was to be in the forefront of the revolutions that have changed economics forever.

Always, I have been overpaid to do what has been pure fun.