Paul Samuelson on the History of Economic Analysis

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, Francois 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 economique 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. Thunen 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 Bohm'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.