Robert Samuelson, RIP

The excellent economics journalist who did what journalists are supposed to do -- translate specialized stuff for average readers-- died Dec. 13. I mentioned him in my column as often as possible.

Dec 17, 2025

The New York Times wrote this obituary about Robert Samuelson, a columnist who provided good economic sense for the pages of the Washington Post and Newsweek.

A man cups his face with his right hand while sitting in an office overflowing with papers and books. — Robert Samuelson at work … You can tell he worked at a newspaper because he was surrounded by years of piled up crap.

Here’s one of my columns from 1998 that mentions Samuelson:

BILL STEIGERWALD MAGAZINES Illustrating the benefits of competition 0 ne age The tions of our has attack future been of for greatest under months. American institu- savsports journalism as we have known it is at stake. Yet no lawmaker has proposed a bill to protect it. It's further proof of the predatory capitalistic world we live in. Our beloved Sports Illustrated - the Time Inc. cash-register and the only weekly sports magazine Baby Boomers have really ever read - is being mugged by some upstart called ESPN the Magazine. ESPN the Magazine is the new oversized biweekly for GenerationX readers with MTV-attention spans being put out by Disney, which is the mega-multimedia conglomerate that owns every medium in the world that the mega-multimedia conglomerate Time Warner doesn't own yet. In "Rumble in the Asphalt Jungle" in the June GQ, Bob Drury smartly explains how dirty the fight has been and how ESPN hopes to use big photos and far-out graphics to appeal to the demographic that SI's aging editors and everyone else has lost touch with - 18-to-34year-old males. ESPN the Magazine, with a circulation about 350,000, compared to SI's 3-plus million, is still but a gnat on SI's fat wallet. And it's unlikely to ever duplicate SI's greatest gift to America - great, long-form sports writing - no matter how many more SI writers it steals. But, as Drury makes clear, SI is hearing footsteps. It has been forced to freshen up its look and content, including a beefier Scorecard section and batches of doublepage photos of things like Grandprix sidecar races. Of course, as any sound economist like Robert J. Samuelson can tell you, in the long run this nasty competition only bodes well for the consumer of sports journalism. Samuelson, the Newsweek columnist, is one of the most reliable sources of clear-minded economic writing and analysis. His review of Pat Buchanan's book, "The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy," is featured on the cover of the June 22 New Republic. In "Trade Free or Die," he explains why Buchanan's plea for protecting America's producers (and their employees) from foreign competition has bipartisan political allure but makes no economic sense. Samuelson, who along the way explains things like why the trade deficit is largely irrelevant, acknowledges the obvious - that individual companies and workers are hurt by the foreign competition that free trade permits. He gives Buchanan credit for making the free-trade debate not just an economic argument, but one that casts "trade in terms of advancing broader American interests, preserving our national identity and maintaining our moral values." And he agrees with Buchanan that global free trade, no matter how interdependent and wealthy it makes a country, is not going to eradicate nationalism or bring about universal world peace. But, repeating a truth that needs to be repeated every 30 years or so, Samuelson states unequivocally that free trade is not a zero-sum game. It raises living standards and makes all of its participating countries richer, not poorer. Samuelson's informative and readable review is a good prerequisite for - and an authoritative antidote to- - "Global Roulette," a not very well focused discussion in the June Harper's that wonders whether it's possible for everyone to lose in today's volatile global economy. And if any narrow-minded businessman or worker thinks protectionism is the answer to preserving his particular industry, he should check out "French Kiss-Off" in the July Reason to see how cultural protectionism has ruined France's once great film industry. According to economist Tyler Cowen's history, European filmmaking, especially in France, has lost its artistic and creative vitality precisely because it has been sheltered from world (i.e., Hollywood) competition. "Film culture, like all culture, is dynamic," Cowen's interesting and persuasive piece concludes. "It isn't protection that it needs; it is stimulation. Without it, the form atrophies. If Europeans treat their films as weak, those films will become permanently weak."

Here’s a column from 1994 in which Samuelson talks about the costs of too much government regulation.

Truckin' through gridlock making that will save consumers billions by deregulating the trucking industry within all 50 states. That may sound like arcane econo-trivia to you. And it's true it went unreported by the major American newspapers of record, including this one. But as Jonathan Marshall explains in National Review's 'Cheap Truckin,' " it was one of the most significant pieces of national economic legislation in more than a decade. He says it could save shippers as much as $13 billion a year in lower freight charges. The federal law, buried in an airport-spending bill, forces 41 states (including our own) to deregulate intrastate trucking on Jan. 1 the way the feds deregulated interstate trucking in 1980. Along with freeing truckers from meddlesome state rules and extra paperwork, spurring more competition and allowing trucking companies to operate much more efficiently, Marshall says the ! law will end the regulatory idiocy that prevails in states like California. There you have to pay more to ship something 15 miles from San Francisco to Oakland than to ship the same thing 200 miles from San Francisco to Reno on a deregulated interstate route. However, the above is just a minor Tho says it was the Summer of Gridlock? In August, Congress quietly committed an important bipartisan act law-un- However, the above is just a minor victory for deregulationist forces, who, based on Newsweek house-economist Robert Samuelson's column this week, have obviously been fighting a losing war. In his column pointing out the ever greater costs and ever benefits to society of government regulation, Samuelson says it now takes 202 volumes and 131,803 pages to hold America's federal regulations - 14 times what it was four times what it was in 1965. 5. The estimated cost to society - a crude estimate, Samuelson admits - is nevertheless huge: $500 billion, lawyer fees included. Samuelson is no anarcho-libertarian, but he's a dependably clearthinking, clear-writing economist. He doesn't say that all regulation is bad, just that costs must be weighed against its benefits. Cleaner air and safer cars don't come without a price. When the social gains are large, they're worth paying for, he says. But when social gains are puny as with things like ethanol-laced gasoline, federal smoking bans in most buildings and trying to eliminate the last 5 percent of pollution from our air - he says costs become "perverse and punitive." As Samuelson concludes, "regulation enables government to confer benefits and conduct crusades outside the budget. Costs are less visible than taxes, and the public relations are better. Every regulation advances a 'good cause,' while opponents - banks, tobacco companies - often wear black hats. "The illusion is that all problems can be solved. The reality," Samuelson says, quoting Madison's warning about the subtle way a people's freedom is often abridged, "is the 'gradual and silent' expansion of government power." Someone better send the folks at Spin a calendar. The pop culture magazine's "The Year in Music" issue, which arrived Nov. 1, was probably written at least a month ago. That means Spin's "year" in music was actually about nine months long. Among the naming of Smashing Pumpkins as Artist of the Year and other cliched year-end-issue exercises, there is something of substance Celia Farber's summary of what happened in Year 10 of the War Against AIDS. Farber, Spin's excellent in-house AIDS Establishment contrarian, says 1994 was a good (nine-month) year, mainly because "the juggernaut of HIV-AIDS research at least started to ask itself where the hell it was headed." For 10 years and $22 billion worth of research, she says, the scientific quest to cure AIDS has myopically centered on defeating tr the HIV virus and has been "strikingly unsuccessful." No vaccine or treatment has been found and anti -viral drugs like AZT were shown to be of no use, Farber says. But she is encouraged that more researchers in the AIDS-fight are reassessing the founding assumptions about AIDS and its causes and arguing for new approaches. That, she says, includes coming to realize - and to admit publicly - - - that they remain clueless about what causes immunodeficiency.

And here’s my magazine column from 1995 about the importance of economics that includes two Samuelsons, Robert and Paul, and good libertarian guys like James Bovard, Lawrence Reed and Mark Skousen.

MAGAZINES What's so dismal about economics? Te're sorry to report we've temporarily run out of news and commentary, except that O.J.™ went golfing this week and shot 82. Sure you did, O.J.M Minister Farrakhan's .4 Million Man March will be a big topic next week. In the meantime, today's subject is economics, the so-called dismal science. Economics, of course, is the study of scarcity and how man Hey! Where are y you readers going? Get back here. Please. Dad? Don't go.. Mom? You're still there, aren't you? Mom? Mom? OK, so economics isn't exactly a Jim Carrey routine. But it isn't really that boring. The stuff of supply and demand permeates our everyday lives. Economics explains how the world works. Best of all, a little knowledge of economics helps us to see through the bogus promises and schemes of free-lunching politicians. There is no scarcity of sensible economic writing in the mag world. For the layman, Robert Samuelson of Newsweek probably provides the fairest, most-accessible weekly dose of writing on economics. Forbes, Fortune and Business Week are, of course, full of freemarket columnists like Thomas Sowell, Daniel Seligman and Gary Becker, respectively. And for you two socialist-labor types out there, there's Dollars and Cents (What's Left in Economics), which costs $23 a year (617-628-8411). But this column's favorite source of sound economic information is The Freeman, a modest, -looking collection of essays and mini-economic lessons for the layman ($30; 800-452-3518). It is turned out each month by the Foundation for Economic Edu- cation, which since 1946 has called itself "a n educational champion of private property, the free market and limited government.' You non-econometricians will want to skip the late Murray Rothbard's monograph on "Fractional Reserve Banking," which discusses "the federal cartelization of U.S. banks and the flight from sound money.' But Lawrence Reed's "The Power to Tax" is accessible to anyone who can fill out a 1040 short form. Reed's short essay is intended to remind Americans of "the evils of taxation and the tyrannies of the bureaucracies that administer them," a subject that can be read in much greater detail in American Spectator, where James Bovard's "The IRS vs. You" presents a frightening portrait of the IRS and its many sins and idiocies. Reed's piece contains a cool quote from The New York Times of '94 that you probably missed: The federal income tax, said the Times, is "a vicious, inequitable, unpopular, impolitic, and socialist act ... the most unreasoning and unAmerican movement in the politics of the last quarter century.' Of course that quote, and a similar one from the Washington Post, was from 1894, when Congress passed the first income tax and the media were not so progressive. Another enjoyable Freeman piece is Mark Skousen's "Econ 101: Do We Really Need Another Samuelson?" He's referring to Paul Samuelson, who wrote the college Economics 101 textbook that 1.5 million students still use each year. Samuelson's "Economics" has been the standard college text since the first edition came out in 1948. But the econ profession is looking for a new textbook and Harcourt Brace just paid N. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard a $1.4 million advance to whip one out. Skousen, himself an economist, wishes he had gotten the job, but not just for the loot. He's worried that Mankiw - who has a dog named Keynes - might not properly reflect "the new realities of a market-driven global economy." Skousen has good cause to wor•ry. He dislikes Samuelson's text, he says, because it stressed over and over that the key to economic growth and stability was to encourage big government and high spending by consumers. Also, to illustrate both the limits and subjectivity of the science of economics, Skousen offers this example of what Paul Samuelson wrote in his edition 13 of his text in 1988: "The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, the socialist command economy can function and even thrive." No wonder no one knows anything about economics.

Another Samuelson-based column about what he calls America’s ‘Age of Entitlement.’

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