Negotiating the “Middle-of-the-Road” Position: Paul Samuelson, Mit, and the Politics of Textbook Writing, 1945-55

Giraud, Yann

doi:10.1215/00182702-2716145

Cited by 33 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Because of its author, Economics had an authority not possessed by other textbooks, and Samuelson updated it every 3 years to reflect changes in economic history and economic knowledge. It was used to train generations of economists and it set the standard for a new way of writing introductory textbooks (see Giraud 2014 andBackhouse 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Paul Samuelson, gender bias and discrimination

Backhouse¹,

Cherrier²

2019

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought

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Paul Samuelson's widely quoted deprecatory remarks about female economists are discussed in the context of his having been one of the earliest economists to emphasize the problem of gender and racial discrimination in his textbook. Reference is made both to his published analyses of discrimination, in his textbook and elsewhere, and to archival materials on his interactions with female economists, including testimonials he wrote on their behalf. His attitudes appear paradoxical in that he emphasized the problem of discrimination and was very supportive of women but this did not lead him to challenge some of the attitudes he held about women in general.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Paul Samuelson, gender bias and discrimination

Backhouse¹,

Cherrier²

2019

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought

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“…A recent important paper (Giraud 2014) focused on the difficulties faced by MIT's Paul Samuelson in the creation and publication process of his Economics textbook. Although these questions arose in the immediate pre--1950 period, the McCarthyite involvement was associated with the attacks first on the principles textbook of Lorie Tarshis and then on Samuelson's book after they appeared (Backhouse 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

McCarthyism and the Mathematization of Economics

Weintraub¹

2017

J Hist Econ Thought

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Historians of the social sciences and historians of economics have come to agree that, in the United States, the 1940s transformation of economics from political economy to economic science was associated with economists’ engagements with other disciplines—e.g., mathematics, statistics, operations research, physics, engineering, cybernetics—during and immediately after World War II. More controversially, some historians have also argued that the transformation was accelerated by economists’ desires to be safe, to seek the protective coloration of mathematics and statistics, during the McCarthy period. This paper argues that that particular claim 1) is generally accepted, but 2) is unsupported by good evidence, and 3) what evidence there is suggests that the claim is false.

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“…Keynesian scholars, such as Bowen and Lawrence Klein, were increasingly suspected (Solberg and Tomlinson 1997). Textbooks spreading Keynesian ideas, such as Lorie Tarshis's, but also Samuelson's Economics, were attacked (Giraud 2014). Moreover, financial support for economic research largely came from military agencies and major philanthropic foundations (especially the Ford Foundation), whose funding efforts emphasized problems-oriented research, quantification, theoretical and mathematical developments, and, most importantly, promoted the notion of scientific neutrality.…”

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confidence: 99%

Economists' Interest in Collective Decision After World War II: A History

Cherrier¹,

Fleury²

2016

Preprint

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This paper tracks economists’ rising, yet elusive and unstable interest incollective decision mechanism after World War II. We replace theirexamination of voting procedures and social welfare functions in the 1940sand 1950s in the context of their growing involvement with policy-making.Confronted with natural scientists’ and McCathythes’ accusations ofideological bias, positive studies emphasizing that collective decisionsmechanisms were unstable and inefficient, and normative impossibilities,economists largely relied on the idea the policy ends they worked withreflected a “social consensus.” As the latter crumbled in the 1960s,growing disagreement erupted on how to identify and aggregate thoseindividual values which economists believed should guide applied work, inparticular in cost-benefit analysis. The 1970s and 1980s brought newapproaches to collective decision: Arrow’s impossibility was solved byexpanding the informational basis, it was showed that true preferencescould be revealed by making decision costly, and experimentalists andmarket designers enabled these mechanisms to be tested in the lab beforebeing sold to those public bodies looking for decision procedures thatemulated markets. In this new regime, the focus paradoxically shifted tocoordination, revelation and efficiency, and those economists studyingcollective decision processes were marginalized.

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Negotiating the “Middle-of-the-Road” Position: Paul Samuelson, Mit, and the Politics of Textbook Writing, 1945-55

Cited by 33 publications

References 7 publications

Paul Samuelson, gender bias and discrimination

Paul Samuelson, gender bias and discrimination

McCarthyism and the Mathematization of Economics

Economists' Interest in Collective Decision After World War II: A History

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