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Foreword: Eavesdropping on the Future?
Paul A. Samuelson
An evolving discipline– whether it be history or economics or astrophysics
or immunology – is ever dynamically changing. Two steps forward and X
steps back, so to speak. Periodically, the scholarly group registers more
or less self-confidence, self-esteem, and complacency. We careerists are
happiest when recent past achievements have seemed to be successful,
but when still there are completable tasks dimly visible ahead.
Human nature is much the same in every generation. We each want
to leave our distinctive initials on the subject – fulfill our fond teachers’
hopes for us but (if possible) do it by bettering their obsolescent achieve-
ments. Paradoxically then, it can be just when a science is at a high point
in its Kondratieff wave that discontent begins to ferment. It has been said,
“Newton did everything, and that set back English mathematics for almost
a century while the action moved toward continental writers such as Eu-
ler, the Bernoullis, Lagrange, and Laplace.” The bright shine of Keynes
in the first half of the last century subsequently shadowed economics
at Oxbridge. And because Nature abhors a vacuum, that gave my gen-
eration of American economists – American-cum-Hitlerian refugees –
the opportunity to peddle at the vanguard of the bicycle race. Today’s
textbooks at every stage – beginning, intermediate, and advanced – are
notably similar. Once upon a time, you could have learned a different
economics at Madison and Austin and Berkeley than at Cambridge or
Chicago. Now there is no hole to hide in.
Such conditions generate discontented minorities who seek to bypass
peer-reviewed journals and huddle together in volumes of proposed al-
ternative economics. The basement of Harvard’s Widener Library is a
cemetery for past similar efforts. Thus during the 1920s Rexford Tugwell
edited such a collection that tempted some of that era’s brightest and best.
When I am gone, maybe nobody will be left to remember that particular
effort.
Here is my advice. When in doubt, give my new efforts a hearing. Many
feel a calling to break new ground; in the end, few will end up finding their
efforts chosen. But the yea-sayer does do less harm than the naysayer, in
that the Darwinian process of adverse testing will in time (most likely?)
separate the useful from the useless, the trivial from the profound.
I have reported more than once what the late New School scholar
Hans Neisser told me toward the end of his life. In paraphrase he said,
“My friend, fellow immigrant Jacob Marschak, was right and I was wrong.
When each new innovation came along – game theory, Keynes’ notions
of effective demand, econometric identifications – he embraced them all
with enthusiasm, even overenthusiasm. I held back, worrying about the
holes in those doughnuts. In the end things did more or less get sorted
out. Those open-minded individuals experienced more fun and maybe
did accelerate that sorting out process.”
Perhaps I should warn against a common trap. Often you may hear
yourself saying, “But this is not new, and neither is that.” Alfred North
Whitehead once opined, “Nothing new was ever said for the first time
by the person who was saying it.” Each generation has a need to put
into its own goatskins the wine it drinks. Few of my MIT students will
call themselves “Keynesians” as Solow, Modigliani, and I might. They are
“neo-Keynesians,” “neo-neo-Keynesians,” and even “anti-Keynes Key-
nesians.” But make no mistake about it. Their writings and views are
light-years away from the macro I learned at the University of Chicago.
And the common core of their beliefs is scarcely country miles away from
the vulgar IS-LM diagrammatics that Harrod, Hicks, and Hansen distilled
out of Maynard’s intuitive explorations.
I echo what my mother would have said: to potential readers of this
book: “Try the new stuff. It might even turn out to be good for you.”
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