Published by the MIT News Office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.
Published by the MIT News Office at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, Mass.
IN ECONOMICS Diamond to Occupy New Samuelson Chair Peter A. Diamond, MacDonald Professor of Economics, has been selected as the first holder of a new professorship named for Paul A. Samuelson, Institute Professor Emeritus and one of the founding members of the MIT Department of Economics. The Paul A. Samuelson Professorship, established this year, honors one of the foremost economists of the 20th century. In recognition of his many contributions to the field, Dr. Samuelson was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970. He has worked on extending the Keynesian model of the economy into a dynamic framework, and has been a pioneer in the analysis of uncertainty in economic behavior. This last area led Professor Diamond in macroeconomics and his work has been at the forefront of the current recasting of macroeconomic theory. In addition to his theoretical contributions to economics, Dr. Diamond has been involved in policy matters, serving on the U.S. Senate Finance Committee's Panel on Social Security Financing in the mid-1970s and currently on the Panel of Technical Experts consulting to the President's Advisory Council on Social Security. The appointment was announced by Provost Mark S. Wrighton and Professor Philip S. Khoury, dean of the School of Humanities and Social Science. According to Dean Khoury, "Professor Diamond has been a guiding force in economics for a generation and is in the Samuelsonian tradition of being a complete economist. He has contributed to both microeconomics and macroeconomics, to theory and to policy, to the economics profession and to MIT. As a consummate economist, he is the natural choice to become the first holder of the chair that has been established to honor MIT's most distinguished economist." Professor Diamond received a BA in mathematics from Yale University in 1960 and the PhD in economics from MIT in 1963. He began his teaching career as an assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963-65, and was acting associate professor there in 1965-66. He came to MIT as an associate professor in 1966, was promoted to professor in 1970 and served as head of the Department of Economics in 1985-86.