Paul Samuelson and Modern Economic Theory.

SAMUELSON, Paul A.; Robert Solow; Robert C. Merton.

Item Number: 69878

New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1983.

First edition, early printing of this collection of essays by ten leading economists survey Paul Samuelson’s extensive achievements to modern economics. Octavo, original boards. Edited by E. Cary Brown and Robert M. Solow. Presentation copy, inscribed by Samuelson on the title page, “For Rick Bigger, Paul A. Samuelson Princeton, ’85.” Fine in a very good dust jacket with a few small closed tears. Essays by Paul A. Samuelson, Kenneth J. Arrow, F.H. Hahn. Hendrik S. Houthakker, Ronald W. Jones, Robert C. Merton, Richard A. Musgrave, Don Patinkin, Robert M. Solow, James Tobin and C.C. von Weizsacker.

Paul Samuelson is one of the developers of both neo-Keynesian and neoclassical economics, the latter of which still dominates mainstream economics. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for having written considerable parts of economic theory, and he is one of the ten Nobel Prize winning economists still signing the Economist's statement opposing the Bush tax cuts. One of Samuelson's many novel contributions was that he generalized and applied mathematical methods developed for the study of thermodynamics to the field of economics. His inspiration for doing so came, in part, from his mentor, polymath Edwin Bisdwell Wilson who was a former Yale student of the founder of chemical thermodynamics, Willard Gibbs. Samuelson, therefore, is a successful example of interdisciplinarity, and he combined these ideas in his magnum opus Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947).