Life & Mortality Quote by Paul Samuelson

Progress, Samuelson suggests, is less a triumph of evidence than a changing of the guard. “Funeral by funeral, theory advances” is a deliberately blunt inversion of the heroic story economists (and scientists) like to tell about themselves: that better ideas win because they’re better. The line’s bite comes from its rhythm and understatement. It doesn’t rant about intellectual inertia; it counts bodies. Advancement arrives not through collective epiphany but through vacancy.

The intent is half warning, half realism. In economics, where models become careers and careers become institutions, being “right” is tangled up with being published, being cited, being tenured, being the gatekeeper. Samuelson is naming the sunk-cost psychology that makes rational actors - the very subjects of his discipline - irrational when their own status is on the line. A reigning framework doesn’t just explain the world; it funds grants, organizes departments, and trains graduate students. That’s why new theories often need more than data: they need time, and eventually succession.

The subtext is also oddly democratic. If persuasion has limits, then the discipline’s evolution depends on cohorts, not conversions. That’s both bleak and hopeful: bleak because it implies argument rarely defeats pride; hopeful because it implies no orthodoxy is immortal. Coming from Samuelson - a central architect of postwar “mainstream” economics - the remark reads as self-aware institutional critique, an insider admitting that even the smartest communities can behave like tribes. Ideas don’t just compete in journals; they wait in line behind human lifespans.