But I can tell you from first-hand experience that Samuelson, who died this Sunday at the age of 94, also had some interesting insights into investing and the stock market.

I interviewed Samuelson in 1999 for a MONEY article I was writing that questioned a number of investing “truths,” including the then unchallengeable notion that stocks are guaranteed to outperform bonds over the long term. Doing such a story was no easy feat in the late ’90s. This was a time when irrationally exuberant investors clutched copies of Jeremy Siegel’s Stocks For the Long Run and James Glassman’s Dow 36,000 with the same fervor that throngs of Chinese had once waved copies of Mao’s Little Red Book over their heads at party rallies.

So I thought I’d see what, if anything, The Great Man — then in his eighties, semi-retired and spending winters playing tennis in Florida — had to say about the stock frenzy that dominated the land.

I approached him with some trepidation. After all, this was the guy who wrote the book on economics, literally. Samuelson’s Economics has been used by generations of students, including moi, when I took Econ 101 back at the Wharton School in the early 1970s. Samuelson and Milton Friedman were rock stars to economics majors at the University of Pennsylvania. I thought that perhaps he would give me a few brusque comments and maybe repeat his famous quote about the unreliability of the stock market as a predictive tool (”The stock market has forecast nine of the last five recessions”). If I were lucky, perhaps I’d come away with a usable quote for my story. …read more