Choose your relatives wisely

No wonder I never amounted to anything as an economist. I chose the wrong relatives. Lawrence Summers was much wiser.

Summers was born in 1954 in New Haven, Connecticut, where he lived until he was five. His parents were both economists, and his father taught at Yale, but the family moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia so that he could take a teaching job at the University of Pennsylvania. Two of Summers’s uncles, Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow, were also economists.

New Yorker article

You know Samuelson and Arrow, right?

[Summers] . . . decided to stick with the family business of economics. He had a lot to live up to: the previous year, 1970, Paul Samuelson, . . . who revolutionized economics by making it a more rigorous and math-based discipline, won the Nobel Prize; in 1972, Kenneth Arrow won it, for his work on . . . general-economic-equilibrium theory.

Ibid.

Uncle Frank and Uncle Joe and Uncle Denny and Uncle Howard and Uncle Hugh were great guys, but Nobel Prize winning economists, they weren't.

PS. I never met Samuelson, but I did once meet Arrow. He was part of a small group that I made a presentation to a long time ago. Others in the group included Glenn Seaborg (Mr. Atomic Energy) and John Somebody-or-other (chairman of the Federal Power Commission), and Melvin Laird (former Secretary of Defense) and about a dozen others. Was I nervous? Me???