To The Finland Station

You may recall seeing the obituaries a few weeks ago when Paul Samuelson died. He received laudatory funeral orations from the full range of mainstream opinion - from Paul Krugman to David Brooks, along with important looking pictures of Samuelson sitting at impressive wooden tables next presidents and other potentates. He was, in other words, a pillar of the establishment - economists division. That's why it's been slightly amusing to see word trickle out in the econ blogs about Samuelson's belief - expressed throughout the decades of the Cold War - that the Soviet Union would overtake the US economically, something he included in all of the editions of his textbook (Bryan Caplan dubs the Great Man's text "Notorious"). Alex Tabarrock does some more digging:

In the 1961 edition of his famous textbook of economic principles, Paul Samuelson wrote that GNP in the Soviet Union was about half that in the United States but the Soviet Union was growing faster. As a result, one could comfortably forecast that Soviet GNP would exceed that of the United States by as early as 1984 or perhaps by as late as 1997 and in any event Soviet GNP would greatly catch-up to U.S. GNP. A poor forecast--but it gets worse because in subsequent editions Samuelson presented the same analysis again and again except the overtaking time was always pushed further

into the future so by 1980 the dates were 2002 to 2012. In subsequent editions, Samuelson provided no acknowledgment of his past failure to predict and little commentary beyond remarks about "bad weather" in the Soviet Union (see Levy and Peart for more details).

That's pretty funny, but you have to ask yourself who the joke is on. Samuelson won a Nobel and was a leading voice in economic debates for decades (noted non-libertarian Libertarian Megan McCardle called him a "titan," although her commenters quickly set the record straight). Yet, his conclusions about the Soviet's economic growth were no different - or credible - than the pronouncements of any Party Apparachik updating Pravda about the latest 5-year plan.

No, I don't think Samuelson was a stalinist or even a communist, although he was obviously enamored of strong central planning. No doubt, when right-wingers started fulminating against the Soviets, you could count on Samuelson to provide a quick rebuttal. Of course, it doesn't matter now what Samuelson might have gotten wrong about Soviet economic growth; the USSR is long gone, and we won the Cold War. Then again, we had to wage the Cold War with the intellectual millstone of people like Samuelson among our elites, generating happy-talk for our enemies and dismissing his own country's achievements out of hand. Doesn't matter now, but it sure mattered then.

Today, Samuelson's intellectual and political heirs - the people who have dubbed him a "titan" - are telling us all about the wonders of stimulus spending, single-payer health care, and cap-and-trade; filling the airwaves and newspapers with claims that, hey, they've run the numbers are everything's cool. Doubters are dismissed as teabaggers, economic illiterates, and climate change deniers. And, no one's going to check the math until it is too late to matter.