Paul Samuelson was at the heart of a revolution in economics. He was "the foremost academic economist of the 20th century," according to the New York Times, and the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. His work transformed the field of economics and helped give it the theoretical and mathematic rigor that increased its influence in business and policy making. In Founder of Modern Economics, Roger E. Backhouse explores the central importance of Samuelson's personality and social networks to understanding his intellectual development. This is the first of two volumes covering Samuelson's extended and productive life and career. This volume surveys Samuelson's early years growing up in the Midwest to his experiences at the University of Chicago and Harvard University, where leading scholars in economics and other disciplines stimulated and rewarded his curiosity. His thinking was influenced by the natural sciences and he understood that a critical, scientific approach increased insights into important social and economic questions. He realized that these questions could not be answered through rhetorical debate but required rigor. His "eureka" moment came, he said, when "a good fairy whispered to me that math was a skeleton key to solve age old problems in economics." Backhouse traces Samuelson's thinking from his early days to the publication of his groundbreaking book Foundations of Economic Analysis and Economics: An Introductory Analysis, which influenced generations of students. His work set the stage for economics to become a more cohesive and coherent discipline, based on mathematical techniques that provided surprising insights into many important topics, from business cycles to wage and unemployment rates, and from how competition influences trade to how tax rates affects tax collection. Founder of Modern Economics is a profound contribution to understanding how modern economics developed and the thinking of a revolutionary thinker.

Founder of Modern Economics offers stimulating insight into a towering figure's influence on economics: a discipline and way of thinking that influences business, policy making, and everyday life.

A significant part of economics as we know it today is the outcome of battles that took place in the post-war years between Keynesians and monetarists. In the US, the focus of these battles was often between the neo-Keynesians at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Chicago monetarists. The undisputed leader of the MIT Keynesians was Paul A. Samuelson, one of the most influential economists of the 20th century and arguably of all time. Samuelson’s output covered a vast number of subjects within economics, the quality of theseoften pioneering contributions unmatched in the modern era. The volume focuses both on how Samuelson’s work has been developed by others and on how that work fits into subsequent developments in the various fields of speciality within which Samuelson operated.

Paul Samuelson was the first US Nobel Laureate in economics and the second overall. In considering his life and work, this text incorporates various papers that often contain some strong critical statements. There is also an examination of vanity as well as creativity in Samuelson's ideas.

This collection of writings by Paul Samuelson illustrates the depth and breadth of his contribution to the history of economics.

Contains chapter overview and outline, learning objectives, key concept review, helpful hints, multiple choice questions and problem solving questions

A Financial Times Best Economics Book of 2021 From the author of Keynes Hayek, the next great duel in the history of economics. In 1966 two columnists joined Newsweek magazine. Their assignment: debate the world of business and economics. Paul Samuelson was a towering figure in Keynesian economics, which supported the management of the economy along lines prescribed by John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory. Milton Friedman, little known at that time outside of conservative academic circles, championed “monetarism” and insisted the Federal Reserve maintain tight control over the amount of money circulating in the economy. In Samuelson Friedman, author and journalist Nicholas Wapshott brings narrative verve and puckish charm to the story of these two giants of modern economics, their braided lives and colossal intellectual battles. Samuelson, a forbidding technical genius, grew up a child of relative privilege and went on to revolutionize macroeconomics. He wrote the best-selling economics textbook of all time, famously remarking "I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws—or crafts its advanced treatises—if I can write its economics textbooks." His friend and adversary for decades, Milton Friedman, studied the Great Depression and with Anna Schwartz wrote the seminal books The Great Contraction and A Monetary History of the United States. Like Friedrich Hayek before him, Friedman found fortune writing a treatise, Capitalism and Freedom, that yoked free markets and libertarian politics in a potent argument that remains a lodestar for economic conservatives today. In Wapshott’s nimble hands, Samuelson and Friedman’s decades-long argument over how—or whether—to manage the economy becomes a window onto one of the longest periods of economic turmoil in the United States. As the soaring economy of the 1950s gave way to decades stalked by declining prosperity and "stagflation," it was a time when the theory and practice of economics became the preoccupation of politicians and the focus of national debate. It is an argument that continues today.