Robert J. Samuelson, economic columnist, dies at 79 – 12/15/2025 – Mercado

Robert J. Samuelson, who for more than 40 years sought to explain to ordinary readers the implications of unemployment, inflation and government spending as an economics columnist for the Washington Post and Newsweek, died on December 13 at a hospital near his home in Bethesda, Maryland, United States. He was 79 years old.

Complications from Parkinson’s disease caused the death, said his daughter, Ruth Samuelson.

Samuelson was not an economist and never worked in business or on Capitol Hill. Yet his weekly column, distributed to newspapers across the country, was closely followed by thousands of readers who appreciated his blunt analysis of the intersection between money and public policy.

He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, praised for articles that the jury called “informed and analytical,” and wrote three books, including “The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath” (2008), which traces the gradual rise of inflation in the 1960s and 1970s.

In this book, he writes that the economy is more than an index of financial performance, describing it as “also a social, political, and psychological process.” This comprehensive approach was present in Samuelson’s thousands of columns—he estimated he wrote about 2 million words throughout his career—which often went well beyond economic trends to address history, morality, individual responsibility, and the public will.

A self-described “numbers junkie,” Samuelson used statistics as the basis for his clear writing, carefully freed from academic and Wall Street jargon. In an article published in Newsweek in 1999, he humorously noted that he had never been part of the country’s managerial elite, even while trying to diagnose some of its problems.

Discreet and modest, with a bushy mustache and thick bifocal glasses, Samuelson rarely attended parties or appeared on television. Yet his views were well known among business leaders and at the highest levels of government, earning him three Gerald Loeb Awards for Financial Journalism and four National Headliner Awards.

Donald Graham, former editor of the Post, said Paul Volcker, who later chaired the Federal Reserve, once asked him about Samuelson. “I said he was a contemporary from college,” Graham recalled in an e-mail, “and Volcker said, ‘Really? He’s a young man? I thought he was this grumpy old man who had seen it all.’

Richard M. Smith, a former Newsweek editor, told the Post that “Sam,” as his friends called him, “was in a league of his own: not just the best non-economist, but an analyst who saw connections that most experts missed.” »

Samuelson joined the Post in 1969 as a business reporter. He worked as a freelancer before becoming a columnist for the National Journal, then a weekly known for its in-depth analyzes of Congress and federal politics. He began working with the Post in 1977 and later with Newsweek, then owned by the Washington Post Co.

“From the 1973 oil embargo…to the tax and deficit battles of the 1980s and 1990s, Samuelson has been a more reliable guide than any other columnist on public policy issues. Balanced, dedicated, fair and impartial,” David Warsh, a politics and economics journalist, wrote in the Boston Globe in 1996.

Samuelson had a classically conservative view of capitalism and economics, without aligning politically with any party. (He was not related to the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson, most associated with the Keynesian school.) He was once intrigued by surveys that showed Americans were pessimistic about the economy — or, as he wrote in his 1995 book “The Good Life and Its Discontents,” “feel bad when things are good.” Statistically, he noted, they were better off than previous generations, with higher wages, better health care, and better transportation and housing conditions.

He advocated a balanced federal budget and argued for raising the retirement age and reducing the size of Social Security and other government programs for seniors. He repeatedly called for an end to federal support for Amtrak, saying the state-owned rail operator had wasted billions of dollars and was “a prime example of how the federal government has piled on so many non-essential functions.”

Some critics noted that despite his ideological independence, Samuelson often demonstrated more support for Republican initiatives than Democratic initiatives.

“He is far more bothered by the benefits claimed by the elderly and welfare recipients than by those claimed by tobacco farmers, cattle ranchers, and mining and military corporations,” wrote sociologist and author Todd Gitlin, a voice of the New Left, in a review of the book “The Good Life and Its Discontents.”

Samuelson praised President Ronald Reagan and Volcker’s efforts to reduce inflation in the early 1980s, but three decades later he called Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act an “illusion of reform.” In another column, in 2012, he wrote that free or low-cost higher education “has already served its purpose” and that it was “time to abandon it.”

Before retiring in 2020, Samuelson covered the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. In a column, he compared President Donald Trump’s leadership during the outbreak to that of President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression.

He is survived by his wife, Judith Herr, to whom he was married for 42 years; three children, Ruth, Michael and John Samuelson; a brother; and two grandchildren.

In his farewell column, published in September 2020, Samuelson suggested that a life dedicated to public comment brings a deep sense of humility.

“I have explored dozens of topics: recessions, inflation, executive compensation, budget deficits, climate change, poverty, the welfare state, trade, taxes, aging, cybersecurity, China, the stock market and many others,” he wrote. “As far as I know, nothing I wrote has ever had the slightest effect on what actually happened.”

“I resigned myself to it,” he added. “No one elected me for anything. In our system, the people govern, not the commentators; and that’s the way it should be.”