Volume 8, No. 2 (Summer 2005)
Symposium: On the Occasion of the Eighteenth Edition of Paul Samuelson’s Economics
It is no wonder that the vast majority of Americans do not know whom, if anyone, they should believe regarding economic pronouncements. Much of the credit for this intellectual legacy can be laid at the feet of Paul A. Samuelson, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, who took the public mind by storm with his phenomenally popular textbook, Economics: An Introductory Analysis.
Samuelson, through the popularity of his brew of historicist, Walrasian, and Keynesian analysis, paved the way for the current dismal reputation of the dismal science, Rothbard, by developing his theory within the praxeological tradition of Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Mises, established an economic edifice that is both thoroughly realistic and universal, providing both students and professional scholars a consistent antidote for the contemporary interventionist mish-mash of free-market rhetoric and statist economic policy.