E' morto Paul Samuelson

[el_figus]

mi sembrava doveroso il thread in questa sezione!

http://www.corriere.it/economia/09_d...4f02aabc.shtml

http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson

l'ho incontrato molte volte studiando macro e micro

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[Fromstudytowork]

dopo quasi 24 ore dalla morte e fiumi di pagine di giornali - molti dei quali dove egli stesso scrisse - propongo l'interessante articolo di Oscar Giannino che potete leggere interamente qui. Ecco alcuni estratti.

Innazitutto chi era...

Nessun altro ha venduto cinque milioni di copie di un manuale, come Samuelson con il suo “Economia”, per 50 anni aggiornato dopo la prima edizione, del 1948. Almeno 40 milioni di laureati in economia in tutto il mondo, si calcola, hanno studiato sul suo manuale. E nessun premio Nobel per l’economia, fu il primo americano a riceverlo nel 1970, ha mai esercitato un’influenza così profonda non solo sulla sua materia, ma sul dibattito pubblico americano e mondiale come Samuelson è stato capace di fare.

Poi riferimenti alla sua famosissima teoria conosciuta come 'sintesi neoclassica':

Suo obiettivo era unire il meglio di Keynes e della sua Teoria Generale, incentrata sul ruolo essenziale della domanda pubblica per equilibrare il ciclo economico, con il meglio della teoria marginalista di Marshall e degli austriaci, nell’analisi dell’equilibrio tra domanda e offerta e nell’interpretazione degli impulsi all’azione nel mercato di individui e imprese.

Poi qualcosa sugli ultimi anni:

Era dichiaratamente scettico verso alcuni nuovi filoni di ricerca degli ultimi decenni, dalla Neuroeconomy di Kahneman all’istituzionalismo di Douglas North, e tanto meno gli piaceva la scuola delle aspettative razionali di Bob Lucas e Thomas Sargent, che pure molto gli dovevano in gioventù – e sempre glie lo hanno riconosciuto – per i suoi approfondimenti sulla scuola austriaca.

Infine, la citazione per chiudere:
Perché “la storia ha dimostrato che i capitalisti vanno carichi di ottimismo anche al loro funerale”.

[Fromstudytowork]

Originalmente inviato da el_figus

l'ho incontrato molte volte studiando macro e micro

si anche io... e ho appena trovato su internet qualcosa che riesce a sintetizzare il suo contributo dividendolo proprio tra micro e macro:

In microeconomics, he is responsible for the theory of revealed preference. This and his related efforts on the question of utility measurement and integrability opened the way for future developments by Debreu, Georgescu-Roegen and Uzawa.
He also introduced the use of comparative statics and dynamics through his "correspondence principle" which was applied fruitfully in his contributions to the dynamic stability of general equilibrium.
He also developed what are now called "Bergson-Samuelson social welfare functions" and, no less famously, Samuelson is responsible for the harnessing of "public goods" into Neoclassical theory.

In macroeconomics, Samuelson's multiplier-accelerator macrodynamic model is justly famous, as is his presentation of the Phillips Curve to the world.
He is also famous for popularizing Allais's "overlapping generations" model which has since found many applications in macroeconomics and monetary theory. In many ways, his work on speculative prices effectively anticipates the efficient markets hypothesis in finance theory.
His work on diversification and the "lifetime portfolio" is also well known.

[Dunwich]

non ci dimentichiamo anche dei contributi in economia internazionale... teorema del pareggiamento dei fattori

[Il_Sovrano]

r.i.p.

[eldoc1986]

Rip

Anch'io l'ho incontrato parecchie volte

[Fromstudytowork]

Originalmente inviato da eldoc1986

Rip

Anch'io l'ho incontrato parecchie volte

bè, chiunque abbia frequentato un corso di laurea in ECONOMIA ha sicuramente incontrato il suo manuale ECONOMICS - scritto con Nordhaus e tradotto in italiano da un mio Professore: tradotto in 20 lingue è il manuale di riferimento innanzitutto di Microeconomia ma anche di Macroeconomia e Economia politica base... che ricordi!

[Fromstudytowork]

Originalmente inviato da Dunwich

non ci dimentichiamo anche dei contributi in economia internazionale... teorema del pareggiamento dei fattori

in effetti non solo HOS ma anche il cosiddetto Effetto Balassa-Samuelson, che ho studiato da poco ma non sotto questo nome...

[Fromstudytowork]

mi sembra giusto menzionare anche l'articolo di quello che - a torto o ragione fate voi - è considerato il suo 'continuatore': mi riferisco a Paul Krugman che su VOX ieri ha scritto l'articolo "The incomparable economist" interamente consultabile qui.
Ne offro come sempre uno stralcio che credo sia significativo perchè mostra le "seminal insights" del suo pensiero:

1. Revealed preference: There was a revolution in consumer theory in the 1930s, as economists realised that there was much more to consumer choice than diminishing marginal utility. But it was Samuelson who taught us how much can be inferred from the simple proposition that what people choose must be something they prefer to something else they could have afforded but don’t choose.

2. Welfare economics: What does it mean to say that one economic outcome is better than another? This was a blurry concept before Samuelson came in, with much confusion about how to think about income distribution. Samuelson taught us how to use the concept of redistribution by an ethical observer to make sense of the concept of social welfare – and thereby also taught us the limits of that concept in the real world, where there is no such observer and redistribution usually doesn’t happen.

3. Gains from trade: What does it mean to say that international trade is beneficial? What are the limits of that proposition? The starting point is Samuelson’s analysis of the gains from trade, which drew on both revealed preference and his welfare analysis. And everything since, from the distortions analysis of Bhagwati and Johnson to the generalised comparative advantage concepts of Deardorff, has been based on that insight.

4. Public goods: Why must some goods and services be provided by the government? What makes some, but only some, goods suitable for private markets? It all goes back to Samuelson’s 1954 “Pure theory of public expenditure”.

5. Factor-proportions trade theory: Every time we talk about resources and comparative advantage, every time we worry about the effect of trade on income distribution, we’re harking back to Samuelson’s work in the 1940s and 1950s. He took the vague, confusing ideas of Ohlin and Heckscher and turned them into a sharp-edged model that defined most trade theory for a generation, and remains a key part of the modern synthesis.

6. Exchange rates and the balance of payments: A bit of personal storytelling: Most people who work in international trade tend to lose the thread when the discussion turns to exchange rates and the balance of payments; as I’ve sometimes put it, the real trade people regard international macro as voodoo, while the international macro people regard real trade as boring and irrelevant (and when I’m in a sour mood, I suggest that both are right). But I was saved from all that when I read Dornbusch, Fischer, and Samuelson (1977) on Ricardian trade, which among other things showed how trade and macro, exchange rates and the balance of payments, the possibility of gains from trade but also the possibility of unemployment, all fit together.

What I learned later was that Samuelson grasped these issues much earlier, although the neatness of the DFS formulation surely helped get them across. Here’s what he wrote in his 1964 paper “Theoretical notes on trade problems”: “With employment less than full and Net National Product suboptimal, all the debunked mercantilist arguments turn out to be valid.” And he went on to mention the appendix to the latest edition of his Economics, “pointing out the genuine problems for free-trade apologetics raised by overvaluation”. The solution, of course, was to end the overvaluation rather than restrict trade; Samuelson understood that good macroeconomic policies are a prerequisite for good microeconomic policies. More on that in a minute.

7. Overlapping generations: Samuelson’s 1958 overlapping-generations model of borrowing and lending is the ur-framework for thinking about everything from Social Security to household debt. It’s hard to imagine macro without it.

8. Random-walk finance: Samuelson’s demonstration that forward-looking investors imply randomly fluctuation prices is the starting point for much of modern finance.

E infine si può leggere il saluto di Krugman:

So let us praise Paul Anthony Samuelson, the incomparable economist. There has never been, and will never be, anyone to match him.

[albedo]

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