Linear Programming and Economic Analysis.

SAMUELSON, Paul A.; Robert M. Solow; Robert Dorfman.

$2,000.00

Item Number: 88234

New York: McGraw-Hill Company, Inc, 1958.

First edition of this classic text. Octavo, original gray cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed Paul Samuelson to colleague and close friend Francis Bator on the front free endpaper, “With thanks of Paul S.” With Francis M. Bator signature and note Gift of PAS, Jan. 17, 1958. Also laid in is a note, “With the Compliments of Paul A. Samuelson.” The recipient, Francis M. Bator was Deputy National Security Advisor of the United States from 1965 to 1967. He was also a Special Assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Bator was Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government where he was founding chairman of the School’s Public Policy Program, and director of studies in its Institute of Politics. Before coming to Harvard in 1967 he served as deputy national security advisor to President Lyndon Johnson covering U.S.-European relations and foreign economic policy. On the occasion of his departure from the White House, The Economist of London headed an article about his service “Europe’s Assistant.” Bator’s 1958 article “The Anatomy of Market Failure,” was recently described as “the standard reference” to the “approach [that] now forms the basis of …textbook expositions in the economics of the public sector.” His 1960 book, The Question of Government Spending, was described in the Economic Journal “as a model of the sort of contribution which the economist can make to informed public discussion” and in the New York Times as one of seven books that influenced President Kennedy’s approach to the presidency. In near fine condition. A nice association.

Linear programming has been one of the most important postwar developments in economic theory, but until publication of the Linear Programming and Economic Analysis, no text offered a comprehensive treatment of the many facets of the relationship of linear programming to traditional economic theory. This book was the first to provide a wide-ranging survey of such important aspects of the topic as the interrelations between the celebrated von Neumann theory of games and linear programming, and the relationship between game theory and the traditional economic theories of duopoly and bilateral monopoly.