Too Good to be True?
Roger Backhouse, Paul Samuelson’s biographer, has kindly suppled a copy of a letter from Paul Samuelson to Newsweek managing Lester Bernstein resigning his column in May 1981, three years before I asserted today that Samuelson was still writing in 1984.
I have searched my available files (as I did yesterday) and can’t find the Samuelson column, which I had thought was secure in its own little folder. I am unable to get into the undergraduate library where bound issues of Newsweek are to be found. (Very inconvenient, but They changed the rules.) I can probably talk my way into the library tomorrow, or perhaps even this afternoon. I have a clear memory of standing there fifteen years ago, double-checking the absence of Samuelson’s column with that of Milton Friedman three weeks earlier (or any time after), but, well, you know about memory.
The point is, don’t retail today’s weekly to friends until you hear from me again.
dw