Paul Samuelson and Modern Economic Theory.

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

Item Number: 4676

New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 193.

First edition. Octavo, original boards. Edited by E. Cary Brown and Robert M. Solow. Inscribed by Paul Samuelson to fellow economist Richard Musgrave on the half title page, “For Dick Musgrave, in long friendship and warm admiration Paul.” Richard Musgrave was the author of the seminal work The Theory of Public Finance. Martin Feldstein said of him that he “transformed economics in the 1950s and 1960s from a descriptive and institutional subject to one that used the tools of Microeconomics and Keynesian Macroeconomics to understand the effect of taxes.” Musgrave published his seminal paper, “Voluntary Exchange Theory of Public Economy” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1939 and it was Paul Samuelson who would later convert this from a positive theory to a normative theory. Additionally signed by fellow Nobel Prize-winning economists Robert M. Solow and Robert C. Merton, who both contributed articles to this volume. Fine in a near fine dust jacket with a few small closed tears. A wonderful association copy, most rare signed by three Nobel Prize-winning economists.

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).