Paul Samuelson on the History of Economic Analysis
Selected Essays

This collection of writings by Paul Samuelson illustrates the depth and breadth of his contribution to the history of economics.

Steven G. Medema (Edited by), Anthony M. C. Waterman (Edited by)

9781107029934, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 November 2014

478 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.7 cm, 0.81 kg

'This book's editors begin with the observation that 'perhaps 20 percent' of Paul Samuelson's scholarly publications 'are clearly identifiable as studies of the history of economic thought' (HET). As a tribute to this intellectual bequest, they have, with Samuelson's animated collaboration, republished 17 of his HET papers and provided an exhaustive bibliography.' William Coleman, Economic Record

As one of the most famous economists of the twentieth century, Paul Anthony Samuelson revolutionized many branches of economic theory. As a diligent student of his predecessors, he reconstructed their economic analyses in the mathematical idiom he pioneered. Out of Samuelson's more than eighty articles, essays, and memoirs, the editors of this collection have selected seventeen. Twelve are mathematical reconstructions of some of the most famous work in the history of economic thought - work by David Hume, François Quesnay, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and others. One is a methodological essay defending the Whig history that he was sometimes accused of promulgating; two deal with the achievements of Joseph Schumpeter and Denis Robertson; and two review theoretical developments of his own time: Keynesian economics and monopolistic competition. The collection provides readers with a sense of the depth and breadth of Samuelson's contributions to the study of the history of economics.

1. Introduction
2. Out of the closet: a program for the Whig history of economic science
3. A corrected version of Hume's equilibrating mechanism for international trade
4. Quesnay's tableau économique as a theorist would formulate it today
5. The canonical classical model of political economy
6. A modern theorist's vindication of Adam Smith
7. A modern treatment of the Ricardian economy: the pricing of goods and of labor and land services
8. A modern treatment of the Ricardian economy: capital and interest aspects of the pricing problem
9. Mathematical vindication of Ricardo on machinery
10. Thünen at two hundred
11. Wages and interest: a modern dissection of Marxian economic models
12. Marx as mathematical economist: steady-state and exponential growth equilibrium
13. What classical and neoclassical monetary theory really was
14. A modern postmortem on Böhm's capital theory: its vital normative flaw shared by pre-Sraffian mainstream capital theory
15. Schumpeter as economic theorist
16. D. A. Robertson (1890–1963)
17. Lord Keynes and the general theory
18. The monopolistic competition revolution.

Subject Areas: Economics [KC], Economics, finance, business & management [K], History: specific events & topics [HBT]