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EDWIN B. WILSON, MORE THAN A CATALYTIC INFLUENCE FOR PAUL SAMUELSON’S FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC ANALYSIS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2019

Juan Carvajalino
Juan Carvajalino*
Affiliation:
Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for the History of Political Economy, Department of Economics, Duke University, carvaja5@gmail.com
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Abstract

This paper is an exploration of the genesis of Paul Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) from the perspective of his commitment to Edwin B. Wilson’s mathematics. The paper sheds new light on Samuelson’s Foundations at two levels. First, Wilson’s foundational ideas, embodied in maxims that abound in Samuelson’s book, such as “Mathematics is a Language” or “operationally meaningful theorems,” unified the chapters of Foundations and gave a sense of unity to Samuelson’s economics. Second, Wilson influenced certain theoretical concerns of Samuelson’s economics. Particularly, Samuelson adopted Wilson’s definition of a stable equilibrium position of a system in terms of discrete inequalities. Following Wilson, Samuelson developed correspondences between the continuous and the discrete in order to translate the mathematics of the continuous of neoclassical economics into formulas of discrete magnitudes. In Foundations, the local and the discrete provided the best way of operationalizing marginal and differential calculus. The discrete resonated intuitively with data; the continuous did not.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 1 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2019 

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Footnotes

I am thankful to Roger Backhouse, François Claveau, Till Düppe, Nicolas Giocoli, Wade Hands, Robert Leonard, and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on this project, the first version of which I wrote as a PhD candidate at the University of Quebec at Montreal. The usual caveat applies. Papers of Edwin Bidwell Wilson (PEBW) were consulted at Harvard University Archives, HUG4878.203 (indicated if different); Paul A. Samuelson Papers (PASP) and Lloyd Metzler Papers (LMP) were consulted at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. James Tobin Papers (JTP) can be consulted at Yale University Library.

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