Founder of Modern Economics: Paul A. Samuelson

Abstract The second volume of an intellectual biography of one of the leading economists in the world during from the 1950s to the 1970s. By 1948 he was established as the most promising young economist in the United States, and this volume tells the story of how he built upon that position to dominate the field. He was a major figure in building economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he contributed to numerous fields, including international trade, finance, public economics, optimal growth, and many others. The book argues that the extent of his influence was not only because of his mathematical economics but also because of his economic journalism, which was much more extensive than his well-known Newsweek columns and represented a very different approach to economics, far from the mathematical theory with which he is most commonly associated.