An interview with Paul Samuelson: welfare economics, “old” and “new”, and social choice theory

Abstract

Social Choice and Welfare has a tradition of interviewing pioneering contributors to welfare economics and social choice theory to keep their recollections on the formative stages of their seminal work, their current views on the past and present states of the art, and their perspectives on the agendas to be pursued in this branch of normative economics officially on record. Professor Paul Samuelson has been on the list of potential scholars to be interviewed for a long time in view of his enormously influential contributions to economics in general, and theoretical welfare economics in particular. Indeed, the purpose of these interviews would not be served unless and until we could interview a scholar "who before 1938 knew all the relevant literature on welfare economics and just could not make coherent sense of it," and is willing "to set the record straight as only a living witness and participant can (Samuelson (1981, p. 223))." In November-December 2000, this long overdue interview with Professor Samuelson finally took place in his office at MIT. It started from the list of preliminary questions I had submitted to him beforehand. Needless to say, he had much more to offer, which coloured and enriched this interview. To facilitate the readers' better appreciation of the rich information provided by Professor Samuelson, I added a few footnotes and provided an extensive list of references so as to link Professor Samuelson 's recollections with what the readers