¹ New York: Oxford University Press, 1954. All page references are to this book.

² Schumpeter, of course, was one of those who had conducted an oral examination of Samuelson at Harvard and who had wondered if the examiners had passed.

³ Feiwel, George R., Samuelson and Neoclassical Economics, Boston: Kluwer-Nijhoff, 1982, p. ix.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴ The selection of these names for comparison is essentially arbitrary; other names which might be used include Frisch, Harrod, Hayek, Knight, Leontief, Mises, Pigou, Spengler, Sweezy and Tinbergen. Keynes, of course, was in a class by himself; Schumpeter would not have favored the designation, Age of Keynes, but the Subject Index does have almost a full column of entries under the heading, Keynesian System, almost identical in length to that of the Marxist System, and only slightly less than that of the Walrasian System (the Marshallian School has one line with two entries). Keynes, of course, was not in the same age cohort with Samuelson.

⁵ Friedman received his Ph.D. in 1946 but had published much earlier; Hicks received the B.A. in 1925; Modigliani's doctorates were in 1939 and 1944; Stigler's Ph.D. was awarded in 1938; and Samuelson's in 1941 but he too had published earlier.

⁶ The number for Schumpeter himself is 11.

⁷ The total number of references primarily in the text are 27; of those primarily in footnotes; 37; but there are interesting variations: the individual numbers (number of text references followed by number of footnote references) are as follows: Friedman: 0, 1; Hicks: 5, 1; Lange: 8, 4; Lerner: 6, 4; Modigliani, 0, 4; Samuelson: 6, 12; and Stigler: 2, 13.

⁸ “It was Professor Hicks who formulated stability conditions that were then improved by other writers, especially Samuelson and Metzler. Samuelson was, I believe, the first to point out that the problem of stability cannot be posed at all without specification of the maner in which the system reacts to deviations from equilibrium” (p. 1009n.28).

⁹ “Appeal to obviousness can of course be met by simple denial,” Schumpeter writes, “but it should not be met by saying, as has been said by Professor Samuelson…that the hypothesis is ‘meaningless’ since anyone who declares it to be obviously valid will, if challenged, defend it by labeling any contradicting facts as ‘indivisibilities’…, thus making the hypothesis true by definition. This is not so, though I do not deny that uncritical reference to indivisibility of some factor ‘which must of course exist if the production function does not display first-order homogeneity’ does give some color to the indictment: indivisibilities, too, are facts that call for, and admit of, empirical verification. Nor is it relevant…to point out that any function may be made homogeneous in a variety or hyperspace of higher dimension: the relevant question is whether it is homogeneous in the n factors (or a subset of these) which it is always possible to enumerate completely” (p. 1040n.33). Schumpeter also writes that “Professor Samuelson is right in holding that indivisibility is void of empirical content (and in this sense ‘meaningless’) but this is no reason for refusing to work out theories that rest on the homogeneity hypothesis, which does retain empirical content however we label the cases to which it does not apply.” Schumpeter cites Stigler and Kaldor in relation to Knight that “the choice of the word indivisibility seems to suggest…more than a definition.…[that] absence of economies of scale to be ‘evident’ if all services in a combination and the product are ‘continuously divisible.’ This is an assertion about supposedly unchallengeable facts and not meaningless in Samuelson's sense …” (p. 1041 n.35).

¹⁰ The controversy in part involved the question of modeling normal profit in the cost curve under competitive and/or imperfectly competitive conditions.

¹¹ “Others in Samuelson's age group, perhaps, have equaled or even surpassed him in rigor or in vigor, but hardly in both. Others, perhaps, have made roughly equivalent or even superior contributions in one or another of the fields touched on in this introduction, but who among them, I wonder, has equaled Samuelson across the board? I consider Friedman and Hicks, Myrdal and Mrs. Robinson, and reluctantly shake my head, although others may well disagree. One must go back one generation, to the generation of Keynes and Schumpeter, or so it seems to me, to find Samuelson's equal among economists at once generalist and specialist in so many fields.” Martin Bronfenbrenner, in Feiwel, op. cit., p. 347.

¹² Another writer with a propensity to make personal evaluations was Harold, J. Laski. On meeting Schumpeter, Laski wrote that he “was overwhelmed. He has Felix's charm and brilliance, together with a power of analysis that is staggering. His picture of the weakness of German politics was as superb a conversational tour de force as I have ever heard.…I was quite literally entranced by him.” The reference is to Felix Frankfurter, then at Harvard Law School. Laski to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 22 05 1928Google Scholar. Mark, DeWolfe Howe, Holmes-Laski Letters, vol. 2, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953, p. 1057. The description arguably also applies to Samuelson as well as to Schumpeter and to at least several of the other individuals discussed here.Google Scholar

¹³ “Impressive as Paul was as a graduate student, I must admit that I hardly anticipated the extraordinary eminence that he would attain.…Paul's achievements have not only been beyond any plausible expectations. They are incredible even now.” Abram Bergson, in Feiwel, op. cit., p. 335.