Robert J. Samuelson, an economics columnist for Newsweek and The Washington Post who explored, in reader-friendly vernacular the perils of inflation, the fiscal consequences of entitlement spending, and the slow-motion crisis of the bulging national debt, died on Dec. 13 in Bethesda, MD. He was 79.

Upon retiring in 2020, Mr. Samuelson wrote a final column assessing his career: “So far as I can tell,” he wrote, “nothing that I have written has ever had the slightest effect on what actually happened. I’m resigned to this. No one elected me to anything. In our system, the people rule, not the pundits; and that’s how it should be.”