Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 12:31:26 -0500
To: "Gunnar Tomasson" <tomasson@xxxxxxxx>
From: Paul Davidson <pdavidson@xxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Fw: Principles of Economics
Cc: pkn\tnet
At 12:06 PM 02/20/2000 -0200, you wrote:
Dear Professor Davidson:
In response to Kazuhiro Kurose's question on the PKT Forum yesterday, I
sent him a copy of a paper which I wrote in 1982 in which I addressed
related issues.
He could not open the original attachment, so I re-sent it just now.
I could not open your 1982 paper either. So I cannot comment on it.
Regarding your 1999 paper, you are correct in arguing that Paul Samuelson
's FOUNDATION OF ECONOMIC ANALYSIS is responsible for the terrible mess of
economics. But it was not because Samuelson used Walras's general
equilibrium [GE] methodology per se rather than Keynes's
Marshall equilibrium analysis. The reason that Samuelson went so wrong
(and in so doing won the first Nobel Prize --setting a precedent for
wrong-headed economists to receive this award) is that he adopted the
classical axioms of neutral money, gross substitution, and ergodicity in
his FOUNDATIONS as Samuelson tried to mimic the physicists that surrounded
him at MIT (which was mainly a technological school in the 1930s when
Samuelson joined the faculty). One should read the interview of Lorie
Tarshis in Colander and Holdreth's book THE COMING OF KEYNESIANISM TO
AMERICA to see why Samuelson did not have the slightest clue as to what
Keynes's GT was all about.
Paul