Author discusses Paul Samuelson’s work in great detail. Samuelson’s most famous piece of work, Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947), is one of the grandest tomes that helped revive Neoclassical economics and launched the era of the mathematization of economics. Samuelson was one of the progenitors of the Paretian revival in microeconomics and the Neo-Keynesian Synthesis in macroeconomics during the post-war period. Samuelson’s signature method of economic theory, illustrated in his Foundations (1947), seems to follow two rules which can also be said to characterize much of Neoclassical economics since then: With every economic problem, (1) reduce the number of variables and keep only a minimum set of simple economic relations; and (2) if possible, rewrite it as a constrained optimization problem. In microeconomics, he is responsible for the theory of revealed preference (1938, 1947). This and his related efforts on the question of utility measurement and integrability (1937, 1950) opened the way for future developments by Debreu, Georgescu-Roegen, and Uzawa. He also introduced the use of comparative statics and dynamics through his “correspondence principle” (1947), which was applied fruitfully in his contributions to the dynamic stability of general equilibrium (1941, 1944). He also developed what are now called “Bergson-Samuelson social welfare functions” (1947, 1950, 1956); and, no less famously, Samuelson is responsible for the harnessing of “public goods” into Neoclassical theory (1954, 1955, 1958). Samuelson was also instrumental in establishing the modern theory of production. Author then discusses his work on speculative prices (1965) that effectively anticipates the efficient markets hypothesis in finance theory.
