It is customary for the Interviewer to begin with an introduction describing the circumstances of the interview and providing an overview of the nature and importance of the work of the interviewee.

However, in this case, as Editor of this journal, I feel it would be presumptuous of me to provide my own overview and evaluation of the work of this great man, Paul Samuelson. The scope of his contributions has been so vast (averaging almost one technical paper per month for over 50 years) that it could be particularly difficult to identify those areas of modern economic theory to which he has not made seminal contributions.

In addition to his over 550 published papers, his books are legendary. He once said: “Let those who will—write the nation’s laws—if I can write its textbooks.”

Instead of attempting to provide my own overview, I am limiting this introduction to the following direct (slightly edited) quotation of a few paragraphs from the Web site, The History of Economic Thought, which is maintained online by the New School University in New York:

Perhaps more than anyone else, Paul A. Samuelson has personified mainstream economics in the second half of the twentieth century. The writer of the most successful principles textbook ever (1948), Paul Samuelson has been not unjustly considered the incarnation of the economics “establishment”—and as a result, has been both lauded and vilified for virtually everything right and wrong about it ...

Download An Interview with Paul A. Samuelson

PDF format, 4.4MB, 24Pages.

Interviewed by William A. Barnett
University of Kansas
Macroeconomic Dynamics, 8, 2004, 519–542.

ABOUT PAUL SAMUELSON
Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009) was an American economist known for his contributions to many fields of economics, beginning with his general statement of the comparative statics method in his 1947 book Foundations of Economic Analysis.

Samuelson was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 1947 and was sole recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1970, the second year of the Prize.

ABOUT WILLIAM A. BARNETT
William Arnold Barnett is an American economist whose current work is in the field of chaos, bifurcation, and nonlinearity in socioeconomic contexts, as well as the study of the aggregation problem.

ABOUT MACROECONOMICS DYNAMICS
Macroeconomic Dynamics publishes theoretical, empirical or quantitative research of the highest standard. Papers are welcomed from all areas of macroeconomics and from all parts of the world. Major advances in macroeconomics without immediate policy applications will also be accepted, if they show potential for application in the future. Occasional book reviews, announcements, conference proceedings, special issues, interviews, dialogues, and surveys are also published.

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