PORTRAIT OF THE MASTER AS AN MIT GRADUATE STUDENT*
Paul A. Samuelson
I can paint the picture of young Joe Stiglitz from reading his confidential MIT file
covering application, acceptance, course grades, and teacher evaluations. We all change
in life. But also it is remarkable how much we stay the same.
Joe started out in Gary, Indiana. In many a speech I have said, “Gary is a good
place to come from. (And so is the University of Chicago in economics.)” At least four
able economists came from that Indiana place at Lake Michigan’s southernmost point,
where just short of a century ago the U.S. Steel Corporation arranged for Appalachian
soft coal to meet with Minnesota iron ore. Joe’s Einstein life line and Paul’s Einstein life
line never met there: I was gone long before he arrived.
I have to assume Gary’s great school system—Work-Study-Play, utilizing
buildings day and evening, summer and winter—served him well. Had I lingered longer,
perhaps I too could know how to be a spot welder. Joe chose more cannily his birth date.
Whiz-kid grinds did not get to Amherst in my time. Joe’s MIT admissions dossier shows
that our hero was truly a big noise from Winettka, by which I mean a big shot on the
Amherst campus: Student Council president, the fraternity bit, genuine good-cause
agitator. However, Amherst could not contain him. Like chemist John Deutch in the
previous year, Joe opted to finish off his baccalaureate doing graduate work at MIT.
On the cover of his application folder, there is a note from the Admissions
Committee to colleague Harold Freeman, the quiet genius who brought to MIT (1) your
*
Note: This appreciation was sent by Professor Samuelson and read out at the conference dinner.
humble servant; (2) young Bob Solow; and (3) even younger Bob C. Merton. The note
read:
Evaluation:
Admit Applicant:
Grant as stipend:
Yes _____
No _____
0
1700
3400
6800
12,000
Check one.
$
_____
_____
_____
_____
Harold Freeman’s prescient answer:
“Fantastic. Offer him Department Head’s salary.”
MIT turned out to be a near-perfect place for Stiglitz. But he was neither born nor
reborn here. He had led his Gary class at Horace Mann High, natch. At Amherst he
starred in everything, particularly in his first major of physics and not less in his new love
of economics.
It was said of the long time head of Brookings, Harold Moulton, that
unfortunately he was both a debater and a football player. Well, like Larry Summers, Joe
was indeed a star debater.
Amherst lived up to its reputation of adding value to promising students. Its dean
and economists, such as Arnold Collery and James Nelson, appreciated his remarkable
abilities and energies.
When Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson left Oxford for Cambridge, half the
student body and younger dons drowned themselves in the Cam. When Joe proposed to
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leave Amherst early for MIT, Jim Nelson, his teacher, wrote: “Frankly, seeing Stiglitz
leave is like watching the disappearance of one’s right arm.”
Looking to the future, Collery wrote from Amherst: “If Stiglitz turns out to have
ideas, he will become famous before age 30.” Shrewd Collery was right, but he came up
selling Joe short by five years.
No man is an island unto himself. By good chance Stiglitz arrived at MIT in kind
of a golden age when a preponderant majority of National Science Fellows all opted to
come here at the same time. A true anecdote is illustrative.
A West Coast friend (who was himself later to win a Nobel) berated me in a letter
which I paraphrase. “Perhaps my best student ever received no fellowship aid from you
guys. Fortunately, he can afford to pay his own way. But why your myopia?” Naturally,
I checked with our department Administrative Officer. She reported: “We score his
‘best ever’ in rank 25 this year. That didn’t make the financial aid cut.” The subsequent
truth was in between. Our student from the West Coast, now a long-time professor, did
end up as a Ph.D. in our best dozen along with such names as George Akerlof, Robert
Gordon, Robert Hall, William Nordhaus, Richard Sutch, Martin Weitzman, and of course
Joe himself.
No two snowflakes are quite alike. Not all of the above luminaries were prone to
walk our corridors sometimes shoeless, nor content sometimes to catch sleep between
inspirations curled up on a rug in one of the department offices.
I find a Solow letter in the file that gives hints about human diversities: “Finally,
let me say that Stiglitz is a very attractive young man, in a slightly feckless way.”
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Feckless? If young and old Joe had had more feck, maybe the forests of North
America would be less stripped of trees sacrificed for academic journal pages. Joe, like
Mozart or Shubert, just has articles spontaneously erupt from his being. He simply can’t
help it. On top of that he has had many collaborating co-authors.
Some sage has said you can know a man by his enemies. I say you can gauge a
scholar by his collaborators. In mathematics the Paul Erdös who recently died in his
eighties left a never-to-be-equaled legacy of more than 4,000 published papers, not one of
them a lemon. So many were written with co-authorship that a new legend circulates in
mathematician circles. If you have co-authored with at least one Erdös paper, you are
awarded Erdös #1. If you have co-authored with an Erdös co-author, yours is Erdös #2;
and so on in an explosive cascade of combinatorial growth.
Since Stiglitz efficiently and quickly edited the first two volumes of The Collected
Scientific Papers of Paul A. Samuelson, I can almost claim to have Stiglitz #1. More
legitimate claims can be made for such acclaimed contemporaries as George Akerlof,
Peter Diamond, Bruce Greenwald, Roy Radner, Michael Rothschild, Robert Solow,
Martin Weitzman, and other worthies whom my pen cannot instantaneously recall. Who
knows, maybe some day in the future we can hope for a blockbuster under the
alphabetically ordered authorship of Modigliani-Stiglitz.
In concluding, I call attention to the remarkable batting-eye of Columbia
University as spotter of talent. One September Columbia hired Stiglitz. A month later in
October they had bagged a Nobel Laureate. Now there was a stochastic investment with
an incredible one-month total return.
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Did I write “stochastic?” Actually it was a lay-down hand, a sure thing. It was
never a question of “if,” only a questions of “when.” Joseph Eugene Stiglitz’s Einstein
lifeline began in Lake County, Indiana, and straight as a Euclidian arrow, it reached
Stockholm on the Baltic.
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