The leading post-war US economist who graduated from the Universities of Chicago and Harvard. He was fortunate in having as mentors men as distinguished as KNIGHT, SCHUMPETER, VINER, LEONTIEF and HANSEN. Throughout his academic career he has been at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he became a full professor in 1947. He was awarded the NOBEL PRIZE FOR ECONOMICS in 1970.
His vigorous rewriting of the theory of many branches of economics began with his paper on CONSUMER’S SURPLUS in 1938, deriving a demand curve from the revealed preferences of consumers. He published his doctoral dissertation as Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947), surveying economic theory in an attempt to move the subject towards comparative dynamics and showing how essential a mathematical approach is to economics. To the majority of economics students his fame rests on his highly successful textbook Economics, first published in 1948 and now jointly written with Nordhaus: to date it has sold over 10 million copies. It introduces students to a wide range of economic theory and its applications—over its twelve editions it has broadened its approach from an emphasis on the determinants of aggregate demand to a consideration of supply factors also. He is known to the economics profession as a theoretician of exceptional brilliance, with hundreds of technical papers attesting it.
In many outstanding technical contributions he has provided a MULTIPLIER-ACCELERATOR theory of the TRADE CYCLE, a simplification of GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM theory to make it applicable to concrete problems, a REVEALED PREFERENCES theory for WELFARE ECONOMICS, a pure theory of public expenditure which takes into account both PRIVATE AND PUBLIC GOODS and a rigorous factor-price equalization theorem. His eminence has made some describe this as ‘the age of Samuelson’. But his NEOCLASSICAL approach has aroused much opposition. His articulate expositions of current economic policy have long been available to the readers of Newsweek and the New York Times. His long distinguished career has done much to deal with the conclusion to his Foundations: ‘Economics is a growing subject in which very much is left to be done.’
References
Brown, E.C. and Solow, R.M. (eds) (1983) Paul Samuelson and Modern Economic Theory, New York: McGraw-Hill.
Feiwel, G.R. (ed.) (1982) Samuelson and Neo-Classical Economics, Boston: Kluwer.
Samuelson, P.A. (1965) Foundations of Economic Analysis, New York: Atheneum.
——(1960, 1972, 1977) The Collected Scientific Papers of Paul A.Samuelson, Vols I-IV, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press.
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