Paul Samuelson

A significant part of economics as we know it today is the outcome of battles that took place in the post-war years between Keynesians and monetarists. In the US, the focus of these battles was often between the neo-Keynesians at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Chicago monetarists. The undisputed leader of the MIT Keynesians was Paul A. Samuelson, one of the most influential economists of the 20th century and arguably of all time. Samuelson’s output covered a vast number of subjects within economics, the quality of theseoften pioneering contributions unmatched in the modern era. The volume focuses both on how Samuelson’s work has been developed by others and on how that work fits into subsequent developments in the various fields of speciality within which Samuelson operated.

"This book captures much of the spirit of Paul A. Samuelson. Those who know Samuelson, one of the great economists of the twentieth century, only through his writings may have already sensed his wit, his intellect, his brilliance. This book brings these into focus, through details of his personal history and a wealth of anecdotes from colleagues and students." - Joseph E. Stiglitz (Foreword) "Probably more than anyone else in the twentieth century, he transformed the way economists think and write." - Avinash Dixit "Samuelson set a standard in teaching and citizenship.that few if any will ever match." - Kenneth Rogoff "To know Paul Samuelson is to be engaged in a life-long intellectual conversation with the most important economist of our times." - Richard Zeckhauser About Paul Samuelson: Paul Anthony Samuelson is Institute Professor, Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Born in the American midwest in the first half of the twentieth century, he was a provocative student of Jacob Viner and was later wooed from Harvard to MIT. He developed original methodology and instigated controversies in his profession. Samuelson is the author of the best-selling economics textbook of all time, for which he never received an author's advance payment. He is legendary for his expansive, penetrating, undogmatic thinking and generosity of spirit-to students and colleagues alike. He has contributed to national economic policies and business trends and was the winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Economics. Paul Samuelson: On Being an Economist is a concise profile of this original thinker whose forceful, profound, skeptical and expansive intellect drove one of the fundamental transformations of twentieth-century economic theory. About the Authors: Michael Szenberg, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Economics and Chair, Finance and Economics Department, Lubin School of Business, Pace University, is editor-in-chief of The American Economist. His books include New Frontiers in Economics, coedited with Lall Ramrattan, with a Foreword by Paul A. Samuelson (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Aron A. Gottesman, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Finance and Economics Department, Lubin School of Business, Pace University, is coauthor of Insurance Logic, Second Edition (Captus Press, 2005). Lall Ramrattan, Ph.D. teaches Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Reflections of Eminent Economists, coedited with Michael Szenberg (Elgar Publishing Co., 2004).

"It is a measure of Professor Samuelson's preeminence that the sheer scale of his work should be so much taken for granted," observes a reviewer in the Economist who goes on to note that "a cynic might add that it would have been better for Professor Samuelson to write less merely to give others a chance to write at all." These volumes contain virtually all of Professor Paul A. Samuelson's contributions to economic theory through mid-1964 - a total of 129 papers. Included are his classic articles on such topics as revealed preference, factor-price equalization, and public goods; as well as some articles which until now have only been privately circulated or "buried" in Festschriften, such as "Market Mechanisms and Maximization" and "The Structure of a Minimum Equilibrium System." The articles have been grouped together into five books, compiled in two volumes. The books, in turn have been divided into sections, each of which contains articles on the same or closely related topics. Within the sections the articles are arranged chronologically. The graduate student and professional economist will welcome The Collected Scientific Papers of Paul A. Samuelson as a valuable addition to their libraries.

Paul A. Samuelson was the first American Nobel Laureate in economics, and the second overall. He was credited for "the scientific work through which he has developed static and dynamic economic theory and actively contributed to raising the level of analysis in economic science." That recognition is now thirty years old and Samuelson remains at work in the cutting edge of the discipline. He is also widely known for a basic textbook that became a landmark learning tool throughout the second half of the twentieth century. This excellent collegial appreciation focuses heavily on Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis. In that work, and a series of brief essays, he has contributed to an integration of statics and dynamics by way of the correspondence principle. He has also combined the multiplier and accelerator mechanisms in a model of economic fluctuations; he has reformed the foundations of consumption theory by his concept of revealed preferences; he has developed or improved several major theorems within international trade; and created theories of maximum efficiency and maximum growth rate. Finally, he has clarified the role of collective goods in resource allocation. In considering the work and life of Samuelson, editor Puttaswamaiah, has assembled a worthy group of brilliant commentators. Among the analytic papers in this volume are "An essay on the Accuracy of Economic Prediction" by L.R. Klein, "Analytical Aspects of Anti-Inflation Policy" by Robert M. Solow, a paper by Vittorangelo Orati on Samuelson's linkage to Schumpeter and Keynes, "Money and Price Theory by Carlo Benetti and Jean Cartelier, and a concluding essay on "The Role of Samuelson's Economics" by Michael Emmett Brady. Most unusual in works of this kind are some strong critical statements, including a pungent examination of vanity as well as creativity in Samuelson's work. What emerges is a clear picture of a special scholar. Scholars and students will welcome it alike-a result that well fits the purpose and character of Samuelson. The festschrift has its origins in several issues of the International Journal of Applied Economics and Econometrics. Professor K. Puttaswamaiah has more than three decades of editing journals in economics. He is a member of the journal; Savings and Development issued at the University of Milan. He is author of Economic Development of Karnataka, Cost-Benefit Analysis, and Nobel Economists: Lives and Contributions.

Paul Samuelson was at the heart of a revolution in economics. He was "the foremost academic economist of the 20th century," according to the New York Times, and the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. His work transformed the field of economics and helped give it the theoretical and mathematic rigor that increased its influence in business and policy making. In Founder of Modern Economics, Roger E. Backhouse explores the central importance of Samuelson's personality and social networks to understanding his intellectual development. This is the first of two volumes covering Samuelson's extended and productive life and career. This volume surveys Samuelson's early years growing up in the Midwest to his experiences at the University of Chicago and Harvard University, where leading scholars in economics and other disciplines stimulated and rewarded his curiosity. His thinking was influenced by the natural sciences and he understood that a critical, scientific approach increased insights into important social and economic questions. He realized that these questions could not be answered through rhetorical debate but required rigor. His "eureka" moment came, he said, when "a good fairy whispered to me that math was a skeleton key to solve age old problems in economics." Backhouse traces Samuelson's thinking from his early days to the publication of his groundbreaking book Foundations of Economic Analysis and Economics: An Introductory Analysis, which influenced generations of students. His work set the stage for economics to become a more cohesive and coherent discipline, based on mathematical techniques that provided surprising insights into many important topics, from business cycles to wage and unemployment rates, and from how competition influences trade to how tax rates affects tax collection. Founder of Modern Economics is a profound contribution to understanding how modern economics developed and the thinking of a revolutionary thinker.

A Financial Times Best Economics Book of 2021 From the author of Keynes Hayek, the next great duel in the history of economics. In 1966 two columnists joined Newsweek magazine. Their assignment: debate the world of business and economics. Paul Samuelson was a towering figure in Keynesian economics, which supported the management of the economy along lines prescribed by John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory. Milton Friedman, little known at that time outside of conservative academic circles, championed “monetarism” and insisted the Federal Reserve maintain tight control over the amount of money circulating in the economy. In Samuelson Friedman, author and journalist Nicholas Wapshott brings narrative verve and puckish charm to the story of these two giants of modern economics, their braided lives and colossal intellectual battles. Samuelson, a forbidding technical genius, grew up a child of relative privilege and went on to revolutionize macroeconomics. He wrote the best-selling economics textbook of all time, famously remarking "I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws—or crafts its advanced treatises—if I can write its economics textbooks." His friend and adversary for decades, Milton Friedman, studied the Great Depression and with Anna Schwartz wrote the seminal books The Great Contraction and A Monetary History of the United States. Like Friedrich Hayek before him, Friedman found fortune writing a treatise, Capitalism and Freedom, that yoked free markets and libertarian politics in a potent argument that remains a lodestar for economic conservatives today. In Wapshott’s nimble hands, Samuelson and Friedman’s decades-long argument over how—or whether—to manage the economy becomes a window onto one of the longest periods of economic turmoil in the United States. As the soaring economy of the 1950s gave way to decades stalked by declining prosperity and "stagflation," it was a time when the theory and practice of economics became the preoccupation of politicians and the focus of national debate. It is an argument that continues today.

A rare reproduction of Nobel Prize Winner Paul Samuelson's original 1948 Classic economics textbook. For 50 years, Samuelson's Economics has been the standard-bearer for the field. Now in it's 16th edition, Samuelson is probably the most successful economics book ever published. The book has sold several million copies throughout the world, and has also been translated into more than 40 languages. The reproduction is far more than just a historical curiosity and an interesting object; it contains the original words of arguably the most influential and most widely read textbook economics author of the 20th century. This 1948 edition represents the orignal spark that ignited the Samuelson revolution--a movement which has endured for half a century, and influenced millions of young minds in hundreds of the world's best learning institution.