Making Things Technical: Samuelson at MIT

Harro Maas

No 2014-1, Center for the History of Political Economy Working Paper Series from Center for the History of Political Economy

Abstract: This paper examines how Samuelson defined his own role as an economist as a technical expert, who walked what he called ‘the middle of the road’ to – seemingly – stay out of the realm of politics. As point of entry I discuss the highly tempting offers made by Theodore M. Schultz in the 1940s to come over to Chicago, which Schultz persistently repeated over a period of three years and despite strong Chicago faculty resistance. A contrast between Schultz’s own experiences as an economic expert at Iowa State, Samuelson’s work as an external consultant for the National Resources Planning Board during the Second World War and the firm support of the MIT administration for Samuelson’s research, serve to pinpoint the meaning of being technical for Samuelson, and the relation of the technical economic expert to the realm of politics.

Keywords: technical expertise; economic modeling; ‘middle of the road’ economists; National Resources Planning Board; MIT; University of Chicago (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ger, nep-his and nep-hpe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hope.econ.duke.edu/node/932 main text
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://hope.econ.duke.edu/node/932 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://hope.econ.duke.edu/node/932)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hec:heccee:2014-1

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Center for the History of Political Economy Working Paper Series from Center for the History of Political Economy Center for the History of Political Economy Box 90097 Durham, NC 27708-0097.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Center for the History of Political Economy Webmaster ().