Beyond Samuelson's chapter on Ramsey

Pedro Duarte

History of Economic Ideas, 2010, vol. 18, issue 3, 121-160

Abstract: Paul Anthony Samuelson proposed and practiced a program for the Whig history of economics. One such example is his account of Frank Ramsey’s contribution to optimal taxation in 1927. For him, and mainly for the public finance economists who rediscovered later Ramsey’s contribution, Ramsey was a genius ahead of his time who used a mathematics too advanced for his contemporaries and was thus rediscovered only in the 1970s, when economists became more mathematically literate. In such rediscovery, a memorandum that Samuelsom wrote in 1951 for the us Treasury became central. I examine Samuelson’s account and challenge it in some respects and explore the historical context of the emergence of the optimal taxation literature in the 1970s. Additional, I analyze the canonization of Ramsey in this field, stressing Samuelson’s role in this process as a professor who liked telling stories about economists, especially about Ramsey, to his graduate students.

Date: 2010
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