Economics: An Introductory Analysis.

SAMUELSON, Paul A.

Item Number: 2266

New York: McGraw Hill, 1951.

First printing of the second edition, published three years after the first edition. Octavo, original cloth. Name on the front endpaper, else near fine in a very good dust jacket. Signed by the author on the title page, “Paul A. Samuelson MIT”. Its fundamental impact on the opinions and approaches of today’s most influential economists is extraordinary. Upon publication this text immediately became the authority for the principles of economics courses. The book continues to be the standard-bearer for principles courses, and continues to be a clear, accurate, and interesting introduction to modern economics principles. The New York Times considered Samuelson to be the “foremost academic economist of the 20th century”.

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).