Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/214845 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Series/Report no.: 
CHOPE Working Paper No. 2020-03
Publisher: 
Duke University, Center for the History of Political Economy (CHOPE), Durham, NC
Abstract: 
In the late 1970s Paul Samuelson drafted the outline of a paper, never published, with a critical assessment of the theoretical innovations of postwar development economics. He found the subject essentially intractable. The present paper discusses how that assessment fits in Samuelson's published writings on economic development, throughout several editions of his textbook Economics and in some papers he wrote after that assessment. Increasing returns posed a main analytical hurdle, together with the elusive attempt to provide "laws of motion" of economic development. Samuelson's notion of "tractability" may be traced back to Peter Medawar's well-known definition of science as the "art of the soluble."
Subjects: 
Samuelson
development economics
tractability
Medawar
increasing returns
JEL: 
B20
B40
O10
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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