Re: Say's Law and Operationalism

["Gunnar Tomasson" <tomasson@xxxxxxxx>]

The relevant source is NOT Assar Lindbeck's address, although his following
comments are predicated on statements made therein:

"The second branch is orientated more toward basic theoretical research,
without any immediate aims of statistical, empirical confrontation. It is in
this latter area that Professor Paul Samuelson, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, USA, has made his great contributions, and for which he has now
been awarded the prize in economic science."

As I recall it three decades later, Samuelson's "Correspondence Principle"
was his ONLY contribution to economic science that was singled out in the
official Press Release on the award.

In 'Foundations', Samuelson writes thereof in relevant part as follows:

"...when we leave single economic units, the determination of unknowns is
found to be unrelated to an extremum position.  In even the simplest
business cycle theories there is lacking symmetry in the conditions of
equilibrium so that there is no possibility of directly reducing the problem
to that of a maximum or minimum.  Instead the dynamical properties of the
system are specified, and THE HYPOTHESIS IS MADE THAT THE SYSTEM IS IN
"STABLE" EQUILIBRIUM OR MOTION.  BY MEANS OF what I have called THE
CORRESPONDENCE PRINCIPLE between comparative statics and dynamics, definite
OPERATIONALLY MEANINGFUL THEOREMS CAN BE DERIVED FROM SO SIMPLE A
HYPOTHESIS." (P. 5)





----- Original Message -----
From: Alan G. Isaac <aisaac@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Gunnar Tomasson <tomasson@xxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, May 08, 2000 4:22 PM
Subject: Re: Say's Law and Operationalism


> Perhaps you could validate this by citing the
> relevant text?
>   http://mirror.nobel.ki.se/laureates/economy-1970-press.html
> Alan Isaac
>
>
> Gunnar Tomasson wrote:
>
> > The latter include Samuelson's Nobel Prize-winning "hypothesis" that
MAN-MADE
> > market economies are "system[s] in 'stable' equilibrium or motion".
>
>