Making Things Technical: Samuelson at MIT

Maas, Harro

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2384705

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…As it is well known, there was not anything like an identifiable economics department at MIT before the arrival of Paul Samuelson whose textbook Economics served first and foremost as a tool to teach economics principles and policies to future engineers but soon contributed to promoting MIT economics as whole. As Harro Maas (2014) argued, what made the textbook so controversial in its first years was how it was expected to present an image of MIT to a broader audience. Conservative critics often claimed that Samuelson's alleged leftwing bent would be detrimental to the Institute's notoriety as a serious, apolitical, engineering school.…”

Section: Textbooks and Departmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Textbooks in the Historiography of Recent Economics

Giraud

2018

SSRN Journal

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Textbooks are both neglected and at times overused as objects in the history of economics. They are neglected because most historians, borrowing from Kuhn, tend to regard them as passive receptacles of past knowledge, yet they are also overused as shortcuts to study the state of economic doctrine at a certain point in time. Looking at the existing historical literature that studies or uses textbooks, this chapter shows how a better understanding of the specific pedagogical and institutional environments in which textbooks operate can help build thicker and more accurate histories of the role they have played, not just in disseminating, but also in creating and transforming economic knowledge.

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Section: Textbooks and Departmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Textbooks in the Historiography of Recent Economics

Giraud

2018

SSRN Journal

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“…At the national level, society respects no such freedom: e.g., migration control, compulsory taxation, etc. (Samuelson 1958, 337) 29 Although Samuelson built for himself an identity of a technical value-free expert (Maas 2014), at times, his values are apparent in his analysis. In an unpublished paper, Samuelson uses a slightly irritated tone to reiterated his view that market arrangements cannot work for public goods:…”

Section: The First Half Of the 1950smentioning

confidence: 99%

Musgrave, Samuelson, and the Crystallization of the Standard Rationale for Public Goods

Desmarais-Tremblay¹

2017

History of Political Economy

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International audienceThis paper provides a narrative of the emergence of the standard textbook definition of public goods. It focuses on Richard A. Musgrave’s contribution in defining public goods as nonrival and nonexcludable—from 1937 to 1973. Although Samuelson’s mathematical definition is generally used in models of public goods, the qualitative understanding of the specificity of pure public goods owes a lot to Musgrave. I argue that the evolution of Musgrave’s writings on public goods reflects his intention to justify his view of the role of the state in providing goods and services to citizens with an argument that would be convincing to the community of U.S. economists in the mid-twentieth century. Musgrave’s definition highlights his lifelong concern for a comprehensive, realistic, and useful normative theory of the public sector

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Marginalizing Maclaurin: The Attempt to Develop an Economics of Technological Progress at Mit, 1940–50

Backhouse¹,

Maas

2016

History of Political Economy

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This article traces the attempts of W. Rupert Maclaurin to improve the research profile of economics at MIT through establishing a research project on the economics of innovation, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The project is important because it marks a significant stage in the transition of economics at MIT from being a department focused exclusively on providing courses for engineers and scientists to one that was to become a major location for research in economics. Through examination of papers held in the Rockefeller archives it documents the difficulties Maclaurin encountered and the failure of the project to draw on the resources of MIT's scientists and engineers in the way he and Rockefeller officials had hoped and reflects on his marginalization in a department increasingly dominated by Paul Samuelson. Maclaurin's interdisciplinary approach to research fell out of favor, and the research profile of the MIT economics department became increasingly monodisciplinary.

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Making Things Technical: Samuelson at MIT

Cited by 4 publications

References 13 publications

Textbooks in the Historiography of Recent Economics

Textbooks in the Historiography of Recent Economics

Musgrave, Samuelson, and the Crystallization of the Standard Rationale for Public Goods

Marginalizing Maclaurin: The Attempt to Develop an Economics of Technological Progress at Mit, 1940–50

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