Some icons

David Warsh pens a good piece, a longish read (with a surprise in it) about the twin careers of America’s best-known economists of the latter third of the 20th century, Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman. They first overlapped at the University of Chicago in 1932.

three colors and blacksimple designMy textbook for Economics B01 (Macro) was the 9th edition of Samuelson’s Economics. The color scheme and overall design of that text retain their simple power. The book’s endpapers are something special: in the front, a line graph of per capita GNP* for the period 1870-1973 for the U.S., Germany, the U.K., the Soviet Union, Japan, and (creeping in at the very bottom) India; at the back, a family tree of schools of economic thought, from Aristotle through the Mercantilists down to the Socialists and post-Keynesians.

*Yes, that’s right: at the time, Gross National Product was the headline aggregate, not GDP (Gross Domestic Product). (What’s the difference?)