Beyond Samuelson's Chapter on Ramsey

Abstract

Paul 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 rediscovered only in the 1970s, when economists became more mathematically literate. In such rediscovery, a memorandum that Samuelson wrote in 1951 for the US Treasury became central. I examine Samuelson's account and the historical context of the emergence of the optimal taxation literature in the 1970s in which Ramsey was canonized.