Revisiting Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis

Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis played a major role in defining how economic theory was undertaken for many years after the Second World War. This paper fills out Samuelson's account of the book's origins and corrects some details, making clear his debt to E. B. Wilson and establishes that turning the thesis into a book was a long process. The contents of the book and its reception are then reviewed

Paul Samuelson, gender bias and discrimination

Paul Samuelson’s widely quoted deprecatory remarks about female economists are discussed in the context of his having been one of the earliest economists to emphasize the problem of gender and racial discrimination in his textbook. Reference is made both to his published analyses of discrimination, in his textbook and elsewhere, and to archival materials on his interactions with female economists, including testimonials he wrote on their behalf. His attitudes appear paradoxical in that he emphasized the problem of discrimination and was very supportive of women but this did not lead him to challenge some of the attitudes he held about women in general

Market power and the financial machine:competing conceptions of market failure in the Great Depression

In the early 1930s American economists widely attributed the catastrophe of the Great Depression to concentration of income and wealth and the consequent concentration of market power, which interfered with the proper working of markets. Alongside this, there developed another theory of market failure in which depression stemmed from the failure of the financial machine to translate saving into investment. The article explores how these two views of market failure came together in the proceedings of the Temporary National Economic Committee, arguing that the ideas about markets found there were important for postwar work on both industrial organization and the theory of employment.</jats:p

Secular stagnation: the history of a macroeconomic heresy

textabstractThe paper presents a history of the concept of “secular stagnation”, from Alvin Hansen in the 1930s and 1940s to its recent revival by Larry Summers. We examine Hansen's ideas and those of young economists associated with him, notably Evsey Domar, Everett Hagen, Benjamin Higgins, Alan Sweezy, and Paul Samuelson, who were the economists who kept the doctrine alive in the 1950s and to whom Summers and others taking up the idea recently turned. Their ideas are contrasted with the theories of stagnation associated with Josef Steindl and Joseph Schumpeter. It is a label for a historical thesis about the American economy, which, initially seen as distinct from Keynes General Theory, came to be seen as a theoretical proposition based on Keynesian theory. It is argued that the idea of secular stagnation had a political dimension, connected to the New Deal and the Cold War and changing conceptions of economic maturity