The Book’s Reception
Economics was an MIT book, unlike Foundations, which though published seven years after his move to MIT, was essentially the product of his Harvard years. Samuelson’s most persistent critic, Beadle, clearly viewed the book not as the product of an isolated professor but as one produced by MIT for which collective responsibility should be taken.
This attitude explains why, when Freeman said that Samuelson had asked him to go through his draft, Beadle understood him to be saying that he would be editing the book, in the same way that he had edited the volumes the department had previously pro- duced.40 However, though Beadle had misunderstood the level of editorial input that Freeman would be providing, he was right in seeing Samuelson’s book as an MIT product designed to meet the MIT’s needs. MIT did not require a technical book, because economics was part of a humanities and social science sequence aimed at teaching students how to write. And though he drew on resources from his own student days—in particular, the textbook written by his one-time idol Frank Knight—Samuelson’s starting point was the textbook written by his departmental colleagues a decade earlier; in revising it, he took up ideas that emerged from discussions among MIT’s instructors about how such a textbook should be written.Economics was also Samuelson’s own book, and it shows how much he had changed since completing his thesis at Harvard. It was a book that someone who was no more than a specialist in mathematical economics could never have written, and it reveals debts to the education he had received in wartime, working as a consultant for government agencies and engaging with other young economists in the same situation. This work had given him a familiarity with data—not just where to find statistics but also understanding how they were constructed and how they could be used—and it had affected his conception of the economic system.
The claim that the Second World War was an economist’s war as well as a physicist’s war reflected a deeply held belief that a mixed economy, in which businesses interacting through the marketplace were guided by intelligent planners, could work. The United States experienced unprecedented prosperity, as well as having won the war. The next task was to win the peace. Samuelson’s commitment to the internationalism represented by Hansen was no accident; rather, it was the fruit of his experience. He had ceased to be an “ivory tower” economist.Samuelson’s attitude toward his book changed as he wrote it. In July 1945, soon after he had started writing, he wrote to Klein: “To my shame, I am putting in some time writing an elementary one semester text book along the lines we discussed. Don’t breathe it to a soul.”41 However, as he got further into the task, and once his text was being used by students, his attitude began to change. A year later, he confessed to Despres that the compromises he was having to make left him “wide open as far as my professional colleagues are concerned,” but that there was consolation in the fact that he had “(rather shamefully) enjoyed writing the manuscript.”42 However, the following month, when he wrote to McCord Wright, he stated simply that “I must confess I have rather enjoyed doing this, although the result is full of compromises and does not satisfy me completely.”43 By the start of the next academic year, when his second, more complete manuscript was being made available to students via the MIT bookstore, his attitude had turned full circle. In a letter to Max Millikan, he wrote about the difficulty of the task involved: “it is a monumental task to cover the richness of modern economic reality in one volume and at the same time give some analytical insight.”44
A significant change is that, instead of deprecating the book for being about institutions, Samuelson focused on the need to capture the richness of economic reality, a task that he seems to have conceived as being different from analysis.
It was necessary to engage in anatomy before one could turn to physiology, and there was no shame attached to doing this.45 He no longer referred to it as a very elementary book. His work for government agencies and his engagement with not just Hansen but also economists such as Oscar Altman and Raymond Goldsmith—both committed to rigorous empirical work—appears to have changed his view about how economic inquiries should be conducted.The first recorded response to the published book came from Samuelson’s Chicago friend Martin Bronfenbrenner, who wrote to the publisher that there was no chapter from which he had not learned something.46 Where conservatives criticized Samuelson for expressing his own views, Bronfenbrenner praised this feature of the book: “Economics textbooks have maintained for entirely too long the tradition of artificial impartiality and it is a great relief
to see Samuelson coming out clearly with his own views.” The organization of the book, he remarked, offered a solution to the problem of how to teach economics to the current generation of students. Seymour Harris, a friend and Keynesian from Harvard, described the book as a landmark, saying he was surprised that such a distinguished economist could write so effectively for students.47
On August 31, before the new academic year had properly begun, Samuelson was able to report the book's commercial success to Compton. He also told Compton about a glowing review in Fortune and a briefer one in the Economist, and that Columbia's Albert Hart had written an enthusiastic review for the American Economic Review. The book had been widely adopted, he wrote, and “it has been a profitable venture beyond my fondest expecta- tions."484 He told Compton this, so he claimed, not to pat himself on the back but so that Compton should know his confidence in him was not completely misplaced. In conclusion, alluding to conservative criticisms about his lack of objectivity, he reflected on the changes taking place in economics:
I should add, however, that though the national income approach to elementary economics is now the rage, it may not be approved of by all of the authorities in the field of economics.
This I suppose is inevitable in a field of the social sciences which touches upon controversy and emotions. I think, however, there is gradually coming to be greater consensus on the more neutral and objective tools of analysis as distinct from policy prescriptions.49Samuelson tried to counter the claims of his critics by arguing that neutrality and objectivity resided in the tools of analysis, a position that echoed the view of his former Harvard teacher and friend, Joseph Schumpeter.m Objectivity did not rest, as his critics claimed, in simply presenting conflicting points of view.
When reviews were published, they were mostly enthusiastic about the book. The first academic review to be published, in the October 1948 issue of the Southern Economic Journal, argued explicitly that, though the language was Keynesian, it was not a Keynesian textbook, for “with admirable self-restraint" Samuelson had “leaned over backwards to avoid expounding pet policy prescriptions."50 The reviewer for the Journal of Farm Economics found part III, on the composition and pricing of national output, the weakest section of the text, in contrast to part II, on aggregative
l. The royalties on these two print runs roughly equaled his annual MIT salary.
m. It is questionable whether tools are as neutral as Samuelson and Schumpeter claimed. analysis, which was “the piece de resistance... replete with relevance,” the stimulating effect of which could be neutralized only by an unimaginative instructor.51
Hart's review, on which Samuelson had reported to Compton in August, appeared in December. The book had weaknesses, many of which Hart discussed in detail, but these were more than offset by the book's many merits. As if to counter Samuelson's conservative critics, Hart emphasized its middle-of-the-road position.52
The supreme merit of the book, to my taste, is a systematic effort to find points of contact between different points of view which students and their neighbors in society may hold.
Samuelson's own policy position is middle-of-the-road, favoring private employment for the great bulk of the labor force, and allocation of inputs and outputs primarily through private decisions of households and firms. On the other hand, Samuelson stresses the responsibilities for economic stabilization which fall upon government because of the inherent instability of the private economy, and the fact that government cannot evade responsibility for the distribution of income and wealth.53It was, of course, the points made in the last sentence, accepted by Hart, that Samuelson's conservative critics could not accept.n Hart, in contrast, saw Samuelson as discussing the “real merits” of socialism largely in order to understand Western Europe (Britain then had a government committed to an explicitly socialist program): “he does not mince words about the evils of fascism and communism.”
The main exception to this enthusiastic reception was Lewis Haney at New York University. Writing in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Haney was scathing about the tone in which the book was written.
Samuelson's “Economics” has a snappy style which may be appreciated by some. It drops to wisecracks at times. The language or use of words is too often shaky and inaccurate. And not unrelated to these characteristics is its glorification of ignorance—repeated statements such as “The instinct of the non-specialist is nearly infallible,” “Every one of college age knows a good deal about money, perhaps even more than he realizes” (!), and “An expert is entitled to only one vote along with
n. Note that Hart had, like Samuelson, been trained at Chicago under Knight and Simons. everyone else.” This sort of talk may make the inferior student (and teacher) feel good, but is it true?54
The book had good points, but these were opposed by the main slant of the book:
On the whole, Samuelson suggests that individual and social interests clash, that the average of prices is adequate, that the quantity theory is good enough for most purposes, and that the main “task” of “economics” is to find “proper” economic policies designed to establish what, as he sees it, is “useful,” “wise,” “suitable,” and “equitable.” The references to other than his so-called “modern economics” are on the whole derogatory.
Samuelson’s economics was, Haney claimed, the economics of Keynes and involved collective action to control national income. Haney even objected to national income’s being defined as the sum of consumption, investment, the trade balance, and government spending. Samuelson got “tangled up” in discussing banking and the creation of money (a chapter that Samuel Stratton, initially a critic of an early draft, had picked out as being well done),55 and he had focused on the quantity rather than the quality of money: “What about the quality of being valuable? In this economics of assumption, echo answers.”56 Haney was to play a role in the attacks on Samuelson’s book that intensified when the young William F. Buckley selected it as a major target in God and Man at Yale, the latter being one of the foundational texts for the modern conservative movement.57 He and his associates might condemn the book as Keynesian, but this remained a minority view that failed to stop Samuelson’s book from being a runaway success.