A belated memorial to Paul Samuelson, who died on 13 December at the age of 94. From The Economist‘s obituary:
“To understand economics you need to know not only fundamentals but also its nuances,” Mr Samuelson would explain. “When someone preaches ‘Economics in one lesson’ I advise: Go back for the second lesson.”
I learned the fundamentals of macroeconomics from Robert Eisner lecturing out of the 9th edition of Samuelson’s Economics (today’s edition, co-authored by William Nordhaus, is the 19th). Maybe the best thing about the book was its endpapers: the IBC gave a family tree of economic thought, from Aristotle and Aquinas to the post-Keynesian synthesis; while the IFC charted real per capita GNP on a log scale over the period 1870-1973 for six countries: the U.S., Germany, Great Britain, Japan (fourth overall but with the steepest growth), the Soviet Union, and (way down at the bottom of the chart) India (and notice we were talking about national product and not domestic product back then).