salah satu buku Samuelson ttg ekonomi ( kalo gak salah judulnya economics) adalah bacaan wajib bagi mahasiswa ekonomi pada era 90 an... Entah sekarang....
Salam toto setiawan --- Sent with System SEVEN - the new generation of mobile messaging - original message - Subject: [ob] Paul Samuelson's Legacy From: "Eddi Wahyudi" <yuditia2...@yahoo.co.id> Date: 22/12/2009 7:24 AM Paul Samuelson's Legacy http://seekingalpha.com/article/179140-paul-samuelson-s-legacy?source=hp_wc Paul Samuelson died a week ago Sunday, at 94. For some historical perspective on the role he played, consider that, for the entire history of modern economics, all 250 years of it, from its beginnings during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century to the present day, the discipline has been dominated by five canonical textbooks – and only five (though, of course, each had many imitators). Those who found compelling the authority of these texts became economists. Those who didn’t became something else – sociologists, political theorists, anthropologists, psychologists, historians, lawyers, reformers, businessmen, religious leaders. The first of these texts, in 1776, was An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith. Smith explained the mechanisms underlying Great Britain’s long consumer boom – the world’s first — with a clarity that still rings true today. His book wasn’t the first word about these topics; instead it was, in some sense, the last. Before Wealth of Nations, there were philosophers and pamphleteers. Afterwards, there was a community of scholars around the world working collaboratively on a set of problems that they called political economy. Forty years passed before David Ricardo’s The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation appeared in 1817 — “to correct the errors in Smith,” the author explained. The world had changed. England had suffered through nearly twenty years of population explosion and desperate war with France. Ricardo (and his friend Thomas Robert Malthus, coming at it from a slightly different angle) envisaged a world soon running out of natural resources, of arable land, of food itself. Their ideas were taken up with great excitement in London. Within the newly-formed Political Economy Club they won disciples; outside of it, they sparked criticism and ridicule. The third great text, Principles of Political Economy, by John Stuart Mill, was published in 1848. It was apparent by then that Great Britain was again growing rich. The idea was to update Smith’s vision in light of the Industrial Revolution. But, as Jürg Niehans has written, “whereas Adam Smith’s synthesis had conquered the world, Mill’s synthesis… conquered only the classrooms.” Mill’s book eclipsed Ricardo; it shouldered aside the upstart Karl Marx, as well; and established the author as the great economist of his age, at least in the popular mind. But behind the scenes, in a dozen nations around the world, a small corps of analysts went to work on a more rigorous formulation. New sciences with new methods were springing up. Economists aspired to better analytic tools. In 1890, Principles of Economics, by Alfred Marshall, of Cambridge University, supplied them. Marshall was the first master teacher to be a university professor (Mill had worked for the East India Company, Ricardo as a wealthy stockbroker, and Malthus was a country parson). Still writing almost entirely in literary terms, he gathered together strands of work from thinkers on three continents in a tradition that in time would be called “marginalism.” With these doctrines economists could focus on changes, not in aggregate quantities, but in small increments of quantities, a little more of one thing, a little less of another, such as to permit the application of differential calculus to economic theory. This was economics of the Victorian age, sufficiently different from what Adam Smith and the others had done before as to require differentiation from the classics – it was “neoclassical” economics. Marshall’s text went through eight editions, the last in 1924. So well-crafted was it that its influence would last another quarter century, sixty years altogether, through many revolutions and two world wars. The fifth great text appeared in the years just after World War II, except that this time two books were required, not just one, both of them written by the 32-year-old Paul Samuelson, who was already recognized as a leader, perhaps the leader of his generation. Foundations of Economic Analysis, which appeared in 1947, was written for first-year graduate students.Economics: An Introductory Analysis, which followed the next year, was written for the masses – at least those who took a college economics course. The new split-level approach was necessitated by the development of the field. In the years since Marshall, economics had finally become thoroughly professionalized. Economists now wrote mainly for each other. Samuelson’s thesis had carried the subtitle, The Operational Significance of Economic Theory. Both books were an elaboration of Keynesian ideas about national income and its fluctuations that Samuelson and others had developed in response to the Great Depression and the demands of wartime finance during the 1930s and early 1940s. Samuelson was not bashful about describing his findings as scientific, or apologetic for the way he expressed them. “Mathematics is a language,” stated the frontispiece of Foundations, attri
