Over the last few weeks, two famous nonagenarians I knew a bit passed away in two different parts of the world. One is from the world of economics, Paul Samuelson, and the other from that of politics, Jyoti Basu. The latter I met a few times in Kolkata over the years, the former I knew a bit more closely when I was his colleague at MIT at my first teaching job in the US (for one semester we even co-taught a course in international economics). Several obituaries of both I have read cover different aspects of their lives and their contributions. The main reason for this article is to point to some aspects of these two very different people that those obituaries seem to have missed. [By the way, I don’t know if Jyoti-babu knew of Samuelson, but it is a sign of Samuelson’s infinite curiosity about the world that he definitely knew of the Bengal politician; whenever someone named Bose was introduced to him, he’d ask if the person was related to the physicist Bose (meaning Satyen Bose) or the fascist Bose (his way of describing Netaji) or the communist Bose.]
When I joined MIT, Samuelson was at the peak of his academic achievements, his institution-building (making MIT arguably the best Economics Department in the world for graduate students) and engagement with the world of policy (in Washington) and journalism (writing a regular column in Newsweek). He had boundless energy, coming to office early in the morning (from my office I could hear him dictating a profusion of letters and articles to his secretary), and presiding over the daily noon lunch table of the economics faculty. He was also the largest repository of gossip and anecdotes (usually about the lives of scientists) that I knew at that time.
He, of course, fashioned the shape of economics as we know it today in all its scientific dimensions, but he was also intensely interested in the historical evolution of the subject and had insights into the importance of issues that were left out of his own scientific analysis (it is reported that in the turbulent sixties when a radical economist asked Samuelson what he thought was valid in Marx, but not covered in the MIT syllabus, his immediate answer was: “class struggle”). But at a deep level, his intellectual framework for economics was defined by prototypes borrowed from physics or classical mechanics. This no doubt sharpened our understanding of the unifying principles and logical structures of a whole class of our theories, but it requires to be said that it also limited the methods and objectives of our discipline. It gave it an overly deterministic and often spurious sense of precision, and a preoccupation with equilibrium analysis. Other traditions in economics, emphasising organic growth or historical-institutional specificities got short shrift, and any borrowing from methods of biological sciences (even a mainstream economist like Alfred Marshall had earlier considered the evolutionary process of biology “the Mecca of the economist”) or from the interdisciplinary analysis of complex adaptive systems, got delayed. Of all economists I know, Samuelson was the most reverential towards physicists. I once introduced him to a British friend of mine who had recently moved from astrophysics to economics. Samuelson immediately made a hand gesture, putting his hand above his head, and said “astrophysics”, then lowered his hand to his chest level and said, “Economics — what next, theology?” (as he quickly lowered his hand to knee-level). Economics is immeasurably richer because of him but his deep imprint has left a mould which will take our subject years to transcend.
The first time I met Jyoti Basu was in the early 90s, shortly after the fall of Soviet Union. He sent a personal message to me and to Amartya Sen (when both of us were in Kolkata in our winter break), and asked us to meet him in a suite in a musty state-run hotel, not far from his office in Writers’ Building. When we reached there in the morning of the specified day, he arrived soon after, with a few of his ministers in tow. He wanted to hear from us what the apparent decline of international socialism implied in general, and what it meant for West Bengal in particular. He then spent the whole day with us, asking many pointed but brief questions, and patiently listening. He was a man of few words, but once in a while, he interjected with comments to elaborate on or illustrate something Sen or I had said. At the beginning I was surprised, since most of those comments suggested some disillusionment or loss of faith in socialism. After several hours, around 5 pm, he said he wanted to continue the discussion but he had an engagement to address a mass rally of his party at Brigade Parade Ground. We took leave, but next morning when I read in the newspaper his speech at the rally, it was full of the usual fiery rhetoric and socialist exhortations, with no trace of the doubts I had found in his private comments to us.
I met him a couple of times in later years, never got to know him well, but deep down he gave me the impression of a complex, probably cynical mind, but with old-fashioned, unshakeable public loyalty to the party, as if bound by some monastic order that defined his self-worth. He was highly pragmatic, and the smooth arbitration skills he had honed during his days as a trade union lawyer were useful when he presided over complex negotiations both inside and outside the Left Front government. But even in his role as a loyal soldier, he was also above the party, lofty and graceful, leaving the organisational dirty work to the Stalinist stalwarts of the party like Pramod Dasgupta and Anil Biswas. His distance (hardly anybody in the party called him Jyoti-da, he was always Jyoti-babu) saved him from some of the stain of the party’s misdeeds, while its good deeds mostly redounded to his credit.
The author is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley