Robert J. Samuelson, who sought to explain the implications of unemployment, inflation and government spending to ordinary readers for more than 40 years as an economics columnist for The Washington Post and Newsweek, died Dec. 13 at a hospital near his home in Bethesda, Maryland. He was 79.
The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, said his daughter, Ruth Samuelson.
Mr. Samuelson was not an economist and never worked in business or on Capitol Hill. Yet his weekly syndicated column, distributed to newspapers throughout the country, was avidly followed by thousands who valued his straightforward analysis of the intersection of money and policy.
He was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1998, praised for columns the committee described as “knowledgeable and analytical,” and wrote three books, including 2008’s “The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath,” which traced the gradual growth of inflation in the 1960s and ’70s.
In that book, he wrote that the economy is more than an index of financial performance, describing it as “also a social, political and psychological process.” That wide-lens approach was evident in Mr. Samuelson’s thousands of columns — he estimated that he had written 2 million words throughout his career — which often ranged far beyond economic trends to touch on history, morality, private responsibility and the public will.
A self-described “numbers junkie,” Mr. Samuelson used statistics as a foundation for his plainspoken columns, which were carefully shorn of the opaque jargon of academia and Wall Street. He comically pointed out in a 1999 Newsweek piece that he had never been part of the country’s managerial class, even as he sought to diagnose some of its problems.
“I am obviously unfit to do whatever it is they do,” he wrote. “They seem to relish responsibility, while I dread it. They have, or feign, confidence, while I shudder at putting a subject and verb in every sentence.”
Quiet and unassuming, with a bushy mustache and thick bifocals, Mr. Samuelson rarely attended Georgetown parties or appeared on television. Yet his views were known among leaders in business and at the highest levels of government, and brought him three Gerald Loeb Awards for financial journalism and four National Headliner Awards.
Former Post publisher Donald Graham said that Paul Volcker, who later served as chairman of the Federal Reserve, once asked him about Mr. Samuelson. “I said he was a college contemporary,” Graham recalled in an email, “and Volcker said ‘Really? He’s a young guy? I thought he was this crusty old guy who had seen everything.’”
Richard M. Smith, a former editor in chief of Newsweek, told The Post that “Sam,” as Mr. Samuelson was known to friends, “was in a class by himself: not just the best non-economist economist, but an analyst who saw connections that most of the experts missed.”
Mr. Samuelson joined The Post in 1969, starting out as a business reporter. He later worked as a freelance writer before becoming a columnist for the National Journal, which was then a weekly magazine known for deep-dive probes of Congress and federal policymaking. He began contributing to The Post in 1977 and, afterward, to Newsweek, which was 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 dependable guide to policy questions than any other columnist — balanced, hardworking, fair-minded and dispassionate,” wrote David Warsh, a journalist specializing in politics and economics, in the Boston Globe in 1996.
Mr. Samuelson had a classically conservative view of capitalism and economics, without being politically indebted to either party. (He was unrelated to Nobel Prize-winner Paul Samuelson, an economist linked more closely with the Keynesian school.) He was often puzzled by polls describing Americans as pessimistic about the economy — or “feeling bad about doing well,” as he put it in his 1995 book “The Good Life and Its Discontents.” Statistically, he noted, they were better off than earlier generations, with higher wages, improved health care, and better transportation and housing.
He was an advocate of a balanced federal budget and argued in favor of raising the retirement age and shrinking Social Security and other government programs for older Americans. Over and over, he called for ending federal support for Amtrak, saying the passenger rail line had wasted billions of dollars and was “an excellent example of how the federal government has acquired so many nonessential functions.”
Some critics noted that despite his ideological independence, Mr. Samuelson often showed more support for Republican initiatives than Democratic ones.
“He is vastly more exercised by the entitlements claimed by the elderly and welfare recipients than by those claimed by tobacco farmers, livestock grazers, mining and military corporations,” sociologist and author Todd Gitlin, a voice of the New Left, wrote in a Post review of “The Good Life and Its Discontents.”
Mr. Samuelson praised the efforts of President Ronald Reagan and Volcker to lower inflation in the early 1980s, but three decades later called President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act “the illusion of reform.” In another column in 2012, he wrote that free or low-cost college education “has outlived its usefulness. Time to ditch it.”
Before his retirement in 2020, Mr. Samuelson covered the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. In one column, he compared President Donald Trump’s leadership during the outbreak with that of President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression.
“The contrast between Roosevelt and Trump contains a larger lesson, involving public trust,” he wrote. “It must be earned, not simply assumed when it is convenient and ignored when it isn’t. Trump shows no signs of grasping that.”
Robert Jacob Samuelson, the older of two sons, was born Dec. 23, 1945, in New York City, and grew up in suburban Westchester County. His father, Abraham Samuelson, had a small manufacturing business and died when Robert was 13. His mother, the former Joan Kahn, later ran a party-planning business.
Mr. Samuelson graduated from the private Williston Northampton School in Massachusetts and enrolled at Harvard University, where he became the top editor of the campus newspaper. He received a bachelor’s degree in government in 1967.
Survivors include his wife of 42 years, the former Judith Herr; three children, Ruth, Michael and John Samuelson; a brother; and two grandchildren.
In his farewell column in September 2020, Mr. Samuelson suggested that a life of public commentary brought a profound sense of humility.
“I’ve explored dozens of subjects: recessions, inflation, executive pay, budget deficits, climate change, poverty, the welfare state, trade, taxes, aging, cybersecurity, China, the stock market — and many others,” he noted. “So far as I can tell, nothing that I have written has ever had the slightest effect on what actually happened.”
“I’m resigned to this,” he added. “No one elected me to anything. In our system, the people rule, not the pundits; and that’s how it should be.”
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