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Interviewer | Welcome once again as MIT professor | 0:02 |
Paul Samuelson discusses the current economic scene. | 0:04 | |
This series is produced by | 0:07 | |
Instructional Dynamics, Incorporated. | 0:08 | |
Professor Samuelson, an award you're very familiar with, | 0:11 | |
the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded just recently. | 0:13 | |
Your comments. | 0:16 | |
Paul | This is a topic that I'm very happy to discuss. | 0:19 |
I know the work of both the men who have just been awarded | 0:23 | |
the new Alfred Nobel Award in Economics. | 0:28 | |
Kantorovich in Russia, Leonid Kantorovich, | 0:32 | |
who was a very distinguished mathematician, | 0:35 | |
who has done excellent work in economics. | 0:39 | |
And from Yale University, Professor Tjalling Koopmans, | 0:42 | |
who was born in the Netherlands, trained as a physicist, | 0:47 | |
as Jan Tinbergen, the sharer of the first Nobel Prize was, | 0:52 | |
and who has had a most distinguished career in economics | 0:56 | |
and in particular in economics | 1:01 | |
and econometrics in this country. | 1:04 | |
Well, before I discuss the general | 1:08 | |
subject matter of their research, | 1:13 | |
which although I haven't yet seen the citation, | 1:16 | |
must be in the general field of what is called | 1:20 | |
modern linear programming, | 1:25 | |
an important technique that was invented | 1:27 | |
only at the time of World War II. | 1:31 | |
Invented independently in Russia | 1:36 | |
by Kantorovich in a 1939 article. | 1:39 | |
In this country by an obscure elderly mathematician, | 1:42 | |
professor emeritus from MIT named Hitchcock | 1:49 | |
and by Professor Koopmans when he was working | 1:53 | |
at the war shipping board in Washington during the war. | 1:56 | |
Furthermore, George Dantzig, a distinguished statistician, | 2:00 | |
a student of Professor Neyman | 2:06 | |
at the University of California at Berkeley, | 2:07 | |
while working for the Air Force, | 2:11 | |
really completed the mathematical theory | 2:13 | |
of linear programming when he discovered | 2:17 | |
a practical algorithm for solving the problems. | 2:20 | |
You could say that the problem existed | 2:24 | |
since the beginning of time | 2:25 | |
but not until George Dantzig made it manageably computable | 2:27 | |
did it become a serious influence. | 2:35 | |
Since 1947 when George Dantzig finished his algorithm, | 2:38 | |
the simplex Method, there have been, I suppose, | 2:43 | |
literally hundreds of thousands of applications | 2:46 | |
of linear programming in industry, | 2:50 | |
in the defense forces, | 2:53 | |
and in economics itself. | 2:56 | |
You might ask, since these three men, | 2:59 | |
I leave out Hitchcock, | 3:03 | |
all made contributions, why didn't they have a prize | 3:05 | |
for all three men? | 3:08 | |
Well, they could very well have done so | 3:10 | |
but they probably figured, | 3:12 | |
I mean the Royal Academy of Science of Sweden, | 3:15 | |
that George Dantzig was not himself really an economist. | 3:20 | |
Now you might say, is Kantorovich an economist? | 3:27 | |
And I will develop the argument that he is. | 3:29 | |
Let me give some background. | 3:37 | |
First, let's say this, the prize was not unexpected. | 3:39 | |
I don't think that one could have predicted | 3:45 | |
with any certainty or even made the odds most favorable | 3:47 | |
to the prize being given to these two men | 3:55 | |
but one realized that linear programming has had | 3:59 | |
such a monumental number of applications | 4:03 | |
and has caused a revolution in viewpoint | 4:10 | |
within analytical economics itself. | 4:16 | |
I exaggerate a little but only a little | 4:19 | |
that someday that committee was likely to give | 4:21 | |
a Nobel Prize for the originators of that. | 4:24 | |
Furthermore, they killed two birds with one stone. | 4:27 | |
There always is, particularly in the field | 4:30 | |
of literature and Nobel Prizes, | 4:32 | |
a tendency for some people to argue that | 4:34 | |
you should share the wealth, | 4:37 | |
that every part of the world should be given its fair share. | 4:40 | |
You and I, most of my listeners, | 4:45 | |
cannot understand the poetry of Tagore | 4:47 | |
in its native language, which I suppose is Bengali. | 4:51 | |
We have to take inadequate translations. | 4:55 | |
It's unfair, it might be said, | 4:59 | |
that only a Swede should be able to write prose | 5:01 | |
which would command the prize | 5:05 | |
and actually Swede's have gotten perhaps a little more | 5:06 | |
than their fair share in terms of the role | 5:09 | |
of Swedish writers in world literature. | 5:12 | |
I think that's an understandable biased | 5:14 | |
of the Swedish Royal Academy. | 5:16 | |
So the argument goes, does Africa have a good writer? | 5:19 | |
Well, no first rate writer like T.S. Eliot, | 5:25 | |
say, or like Tolstoy. | 5:29 | |
By the way, Tolstoy did not receive the Nobel Prize. | 5:34 | |
I believe that T.S. Eliot did. | 5:37 | |
The fact that Tolstoy didn't is a reflection | 5:40 | |
on the skill of the early Royal Academy. | 5:44 | |
Well if Africa doesn't have a first class writer | 5:50 | |
then let's find the best writer in Africa | 5:55 | |
and give him the prize. | 5:58 | |
Not every year, not every other year, | 6:00 | |
but once in 15 years. | 6:02 | |
And so you get a geographical distribution | 6:05 | |
not by absolute merit but in terms of | 6:07 | |
giving every particular region representation. | 6:11 | |
I don't have to belabor the point that | 6:15 | |
there is a lot of pressure in that direction. | 6:17 | |
Well, if that were so and if the Nobel committee | 6:20 | |
wanted to show that it was even handed | 6:24 | |
as between western and eastern economics, | 6:27 | |
I mean, mainstream economics of the west primarily, | 6:31 | |
and so called Marxist economics | 6:35 | |
of the eastern European socialist countries, | 6:39 | |
perhaps of China. | 6:43 | |
At least a billion, perhaps a billion and a half | 6:46 | |
of the four billion odd people in the world | 6:50 | |
profess to believe in Marxian economics. | 6:54 | |
Well, if the Nobel committee was ever gonna play that game, | 6:57 | |
they certainly would have difficulty | 7:01 | |
with eastern Europe and Russia. | 7:03 | |
For one thing, they could have given the prize | 7:06 | |
to the late Michael Kalecki, | 7:09 | |
who did brilliant work in econometrics, | 7:11 | |
in business cycle analysis, in Keynes analysis. | 7:14 | |
He was an independent discoverer of the general theory | 7:18 | |
it is documentable in many regards to believe. | 7:21 | |
But they had to move fast if they wanted to give it | 7:28 | |
to Kalecki 'cause Kalecki was in his early seventies | 7:31 | |
and not in good health and he is now dead | 7:34 | |
and there is a tradition | 7:36 | |
never to give the prize posthumously. | 7:37 | |
So, you really have a great arid wasteland | 7:40 | |
as far as good economists in eastern Europe. | 7:44 | |
Sometime when I have more time | 7:51 | |
and don't have to talk about the pleasant matter | 7:52 | |
of the recent Nobel Prize winners, | 7:57 | |
I'd like to speculate with you as to why it seems to be | 8:00 | |
that only in bourgeois society | 8:04 | |
do you get good political economy. | 8:06 | |
Because it seems to me there is something | 8:10 | |
of an empirical generalization. | 8:12 | |
I don't mean that you have to be a bourgeois apologist | 8:15 | |
of bourgeois economies in order to be a good economist. | 8:18 | |
On the contrary, some of the best work of economists | 8:21 | |
has been done in criticism of the bourgeois economy | 8:25 | |
but there seems to be something in the bourgeois economy | 8:30 | |
which makes for good political economy. | 8:33 | |
In any case, the economists of the Soviet Union, | 8:37 | |
I'm going to speak very bluntly, | 8:43 | |
are not a terribly admirable, enviable lot. | 8:46 | |
I've met most of them, I think, | 8:56 | |
most of the leading economists over the years | 8:58 | |
at international gatherings. | 9:00 | |
For some years I was president of | 9:03 | |
the International Economic Association | 9:04 | |
and I met the three official economists sent each year. | 9:06 | |
Many of them I liked as persons. | 9:14 | |
Some of them one could get closer to than others. | 9:17 | |
But one did not feel that you were | 9:21 | |
in the presence of great minds and in fact, | 9:25 | |
aside from the quality of the minds of the men, | 9:28 | |
they were extremely uninformed | 9:32 | |
and naive about many of the subjects | 9:34 | |
that were their life work. | 9:37 | |
So I think it would have been almost impossible | 9:41 | |
to have given an award to any Soviet economist | 9:45 | |
in the mainstream of Soviet economics. | 9:50 | |
Indeed, I tell you no secrets when I say that the economists | 9:52 | |
in the universities in the Soviet Union | 9:56 | |
are not the best economists in the Soviet Union. | 9:59 | |
They tend to be ideologues who simply teach | 10:04 | |
a vulgar form of Marxism. | 10:07 | |
It consists mostly of stale critiques | 10:11 | |
of what is deceived to be western capitalism. | 10:16 | |
I once read with care the english translation | 10:21 | |
of the fundamental textbook | 10:25 | |
in political economy of the Soviet Union. | 10:28 | |
It succeeded the premier by Stalin, | 10:31 | |
I don't know who wrote the thing for Stalin. | 10:35 | |
If I were he, I wouldn't wanna claim too much credit for it | 10:38 | |
but Stalin may have written his own version | 10:44 | |
but this was after the death of Stalin, a revised version. | 10:46 | |
And there really was not, in the whole of the book, | 10:50 | |
one consecutive set of economic statistics on the west. | 10:56 | |
It was selective quotations, it's very dull stuff. | 11:01 | |
Everybody in the Soviet Union, | 11:05 | |
if you wanna be an engineer | 11:06 | |
and when you get to about high school age, | 11:08 | |
junior college age, | 11:11 | |
you must go through the catechism of Marxian economics. | 11:12 | |
And it's a cynical joke among | 11:16 | |
the professionals in the Soviet Union | 11:19 | |
when they pass each other in the hallway, | 11:23 | |
they say in mock seriousness, what constitutes value? | 11:25 | |
Value is constituted by socially necessary labor time | 11:29 | |
and it would be just like a religion in decay. | 11:33 | |
It's a rule of life that if we were made to read | 11:37 | |
Silas Marner in high school, | 11:41 | |
even if Silar Marner were a much better novel | 11:43 | |
of George Eliot's than it is, we wouldn't enjoy it. | 11:45 | |
Many a person has had his potential liking for Shakespeare | 11:49 | |
dulled by the fact that he read in high school Macbeth, | 11:54 | |
perhaps Julius Caesar, perhaps the Merchant of Venice, | 11:59 | |
and even those plays, | 12:04 | |
his enjoyment of them in later life was blunted | 12:08 | |
because it was compulsory reading. | 12:12 | |
Kantorovich was and is a really first rate mathematician. | 12:15 | |
This is one of the things that surprises each of us | 12:22 | |
about the Soviet Union, its unevenness. | 12:26 | |
They will be able to produce a rocket or a hydrogen bomb, | 12:29 | |
which we know involves precision bearings | 12:35 | |
and gyroscopes that compare favorably | 12:40 | |
with the very best that can be done in the west | 12:46 | |
and the very best that can be done in the United States. | 12:49 | |
At the same time, the hotel electric fan won't work, | 12:51 | |
the waiters are inefficient, there is great unevenness. | 12:58 | |
Now, in pure mathematics, people like Kolmogorov | 13:07 | |
and Khinchin and Kantorovich and Pontryagin, | 13:13 | |
I'm only naming four of the recent generation, | 13:19 | |
all of these men are getting a little bit on, | 13:25 | |
some of them now dead. | 13:28 | |
They are the best mathematicians in the world, | 13:29 | |
I mean they compare favorably, | 13:33 | |
have to give no quarter | 13:36 | |
to mathematicians anywhere in the world. | 13:38 | |
Kolmogorov, if you wanted to compare him | 13:41 | |
with von Neumann or with Norbert Wiener | 13:44 | |
or George D. Birkhoff, our great mathematicians, | 13:47 | |
or Hilbert or G. H. Hardy, | 13:52 | |
you would have to mention them in the same breath. | 13:55 | |
There's a tremendous tradition there. | 13:58 | |
Well, Kantorovich, somehow by accident, | 14:00 | |
got into the problem of, I think it has a very odd title, | 14:04 | |
something like a problem of masses. | 14:09 | |
But the problem is, if you have, | 14:11 | |
I'm stating it in the Hitchcock form, | 14:16 | |
suppose you have eight factories | 14:19 | |
and you know the amount of paper pulp | 14:22 | |
that is produced in each of the eight factories. | 14:25 | |
And suppose you have 50 destinations | 14:31 | |
and you know the amounts which have to be sent | 14:34 | |
to each of the 50 destinations. | 14:37 | |
Of course, the total amount which is gonna be received | 14:40 | |
by the 50 importing stations is equal, almost by definition, | 14:42 | |
to the total amount which is gonna be exported | 14:48 | |
by the eight factories. | 14:51 | |
And suppose you're given the transportation costs | 14:54 | |
from any factory to any consuming point destination. | 14:56 | |
That's a set of positive numbers, | 15:01 | |
a rectangular set, eight by 50, | 15:04 | |
giving the cost of sending one unit of paper pulp. | 15:08 | |
You could ask the question, | 15:12 | |
it's a natural question for an economist to ask, | 15:13 | |
so think of what a genius a mathematician | 15:15 | |
must be to even be able to formulate the question | 15:17 | |
how would you minimize the sum total of wasted costs | 15:21 | |
in the form of transport costs, | 15:26 | |
total transport cost expense, | 15:28 | |
by allocating the output of each factory | 15:30 | |
to which consumption center? | 15:35 | |
Now there's certain obvious shortcuts that can be made. | 15:38 | |
You would, for example, if there was a consuming point | 15:42 | |
right near a factory and other things were equal, | 15:45 | |
you would certainly not send the output | 15:48 | |
from Moscow to Siberia at the same time | 15:51 | |
that you're sending Siberian paper pulp to Moscow. | 15:54 | |
Cross-haulage would be eliminated. | 15:57 | |
And this problem was formulated | 16:00 | |
and the solution outlined by Kantorovich in 1939 | 16:03 | |
and that is his first claim to fame in this regard. | 16:07 | |
The Hitchcock article, I should tell you, | 16:12 | |
dates from about 1941 and appears in the home mathematical | 16:14 | |
journal of MIT Journal of Mathematics and Physics. | 16:19 | |
Well, where does Koopmans come in? | 16:24 | |
Koopmans was at the war shipping board | 16:26 | |
and the problem there was a shortage of ships | 16:29 | |
and there was a great system of allocation | 16:34 | |
between all the shipping of the combined war shipping board. | 16:38 | |
Koopmans, as an analyst, didn't like the arbitrary way. | 16:45 | |
It made sense but it was just common sense, | 16:50 | |
it wasn't extraordinary in uncommon sense. | 16:52 | |
The matters were allocated and so as he thought about, | 16:55 | |
he saw, in a flash, that you could give a price | 16:58 | |
to each empty ship in each spot on the globe | 17:04 | |
and then he worked out the optimal way | 17:08 | |
to maximize the rents from the ships, | 17:13 | |
wherever they might be on the globe. | 17:16 | |
I can't go beyond that in my hasty explanation | 17:19 | |
but that problem is isomorphic with the Hitchcock problem | 17:24 | |
and the problem of Kantorovich. | 17:30 | |
It's a special case, it's the so-called assignment | 17:35 | |
or transportation problem of the general problem | 17:38 | |
of linear programming. | 17:41 | |
Of course, fingers were made before forks | 17:43 | |
and long before there was a detailed science | 17:46 | |
of linear programming, | 17:49 | |
there was a realization of some of these problems. | 17:51 | |
Indeed, George J. Stigler, a distinguished economist | 17:55 | |
at the University of Chicago, | 17:59 | |
then at the University of Minnesota in the 1940s, | 18:01 | |
war years I guess. | 18:07 | |
Perhaps it was 1939. | 18:11 | |
He worked out a famous problem. | 18:13 | |
He said, we know the nutrient requirements of calories, | 18:15 | |
vitamin A, vitamin B, | 18:19 | |
which the National Research Counsel says an adult, | 18:21 | |
he's a six foot adult, | 18:25 | |
Stigler being more than six feet was the example he gave. | 18:27 | |
So we have a column vector | 18:32 | |
of all these nutrient requirements. | 18:34 | |
We know for each food from nutritionists | 18:37 | |
just what it holds in the way of vitamin A, | 18:41 | |
vitamin B, Nyacin, et cetera. | 18:44 | |
Milk, of course is just loaded with all sorts | 18:47 | |
of positive items in the column vector | 18:50 | |
representing its nutritional content. | 18:53 | |
Finally, and this is because George Stigler | 18:57 | |
was an economist that the problem | 18:59 | |
presented itself to him in this way. | 19:01 | |
Finally, we know from the Bureau of Labor Statistics | 19:04 | |
what the price of milk is, | 19:06 | |
what the price of buckwheat is, | 19:08 | |
what the price of kidneys, | 19:09 | |
what the price of filet mignon is. | 19:11 | |
And he said, now there should be a way of meeting | 19:14 | |
the National Research Counsel's nutritional requirements | 19:17 | |
for an adult by selecting the right | 19:21 | |
market basket of food so as to give you an adequate diet | 19:27 | |
in respect of each of the requirements | 19:32 | |
at the lowest total costs. | 19:36 | |
And this is a general problem in linear programming. | 19:39 | |
It's not a problem which Professor Stigler | 19:46 | |
was able to solve. | 19:50 | |
When I first read it, | 19:52 | |
I received a copy of the paper from George Stigler, | 19:54 | |
I immediately recognized its similarity | 19:59 | |
to the Hitchcock problem and I was not able to solve it. | 20:02 | |
However, George Stigler was able to solve it | 20:06 | |
to a very good approximation. | 20:09 | |
He was able to show that his approximate solution | 20:11 | |
came very near to the least cost | 20:13 | |
that any solution could possibly have. | 20:17 | |
And I was able, in an article written in the 1940s, | 20:20 | |
to show that the way a price change would effect | 20:26 | |
the quantity bought could not be of the following form. | 20:31 | |
Sir Robert Giffen had pointed out | 20:38 | |
that an increase in the price of potatoes, | 20:41 | |
we don't know where he pointed this out | 20:43 | |
but it's attributed to him, | 20:45 | |
an increase in the price of potatoes for poor Irish peasants | 20:46 | |
who are so dependent upon potatoes | 20:50 | |
for most of their nutrition, | 20:52 | |
an increase in the price of potatoes | 20:57 | |
would so increase the amount they have to spend | 20:58 | |
that they would have so little left to spend for meat | 21:01 | |
that they actually would increase | 21:05 | |
their consumption of potatoes at the higher price. | 21:07 | |
This was thought to be a paradox | 21:11 | |
but it is no paradox, it's perfectly consistent | 21:13 | |
with the rational preference theory | 21:15 | |
and Professor Stigler ventured the guess | 21:18 | |
that this was possible in his problem. | 21:21 | |
And I was able to show, | 21:25 | |
even though I couldn't solve the problem | 21:27 | |
anymore than he could, | 21:28 | |
that this was not a possibility | 21:29 | |
'cause I could show what some of the properties were | 21:32 | |
of the solution even though I didn't have an algorithm | 21:33 | |
for getting the solution. | 21:36 | |
Today, that problem is solvable on a very large scale. | 21:38 | |
I might say, by the way, that the optimal solution | 21:44 | |
of Stigler cost as I remembered in 1939 about $40 a year. | 21:47 | |
You could get all the kidneys and buckwheat, | 21:53 | |
flour that was needed for an adequate diet. | 21:58 | |
Ram has shown that you can do pretty well | 22:04 | |
with peanut butter and lima beans. | 22:07 | |
The Mexican peasant diet turns out to be | 22:10 | |
a pretty cheap diet. | 22:13 | |
If you're gonna be on a life raft, | 22:17 | |
the Navy has found that caramel candies | 22:19 | |
are pretty nearly a adequate short-term diet | 22:22 | |
and they're very easy to carry. | 22:28 | |
Of course they're very hard on your fillings | 22:31 | |
but I don't think you'll care about that. | 22:33 | |
Well, this is the achievement. | 22:36 | |
It sounds as I'm describing it | 22:40 | |
as the kind of mathematical puzzle you might read about | 22:41 | |
in Scientific American. | 22:45 | |
But of course, Newton's apple falling to Earth, | 22:46 | |
which is really Newton's moon falling around the Earth, | 22:50 | |
is also that kind of a puzzle. | 22:55 | |
And Newton who was perhaps the greatest mind that ever lived | 22:57 | |
has said, I don't know how I appear to others | 23:01 | |
but to myself, I appear to be a mere child | 23:03 | |
playing on the beach, | 23:06 | |
forming beautiful patterns out of the stones. | 23:09 | |
To quote Shakespeare and to cease to quote Newton, | 23:14 | |
really an idiot telling a tale signifying nothing. | 23:18 | |
Well, the tales that the non-idiots like Einstein | 23:23 | |
and Newton and Kantorovich and Koopmans tell | 23:27 | |
are fraught with significance for modern life. | 23:31 | |
Professor Koopmans also has claims | 23:38 | |
that he was one of the pioneers | 23:42 | |
in the econometric field of identification. | 23:44 | |
This work was done when he was at the University of Chicago | 23:48 | |
at the Cowles Commission, | 23:52 | |
so-called Alfred Cowles being a benefactor | 23:55 | |
of the pure sciences. | 24:00 | |
And he moved from the University of Chicago to Yale, | 24:01 | |
to Yale's great benefit when the Cowles Commission | 24:05 | |
was reborn as the Cowles Foundation. | 24:10 | |
And at Yale, he and Jacob Marschak | 24:14 | |
and Herbert Scarf and James Tobin | 24:19 | |
have created from an old fashioned | 24:22 | |
moribund economics department, | 24:25 | |
one of the liveliest economic centers. | 24:27 | |
One last reflection with respect to the problem | 24:31 | |
of giving an award to a Russian economist, | 24:36 | |
you know that the Peace Prize has just been | 24:40 | |
given to Sakharov, the great Russian physicist | 24:42 | |
who helped to create the hydrogen bomb | 24:46 | |
but who has been one of the incredibly | 24:49 | |
courageous dissidents. | 24:51 | |
It was given to the rage of the Russian authorities. | 24:54 | |
I don't think that the Kantorovich award | 24:57 | |
will be to the rage of the authorities. | 25:00 | |
Kantorovich has really been paying the greatest compliment | 25:03 | |
that the capitalistic system could have | 25:07 | |
in that his algorithms involved shadow prices. | 25:09 | |
And so you might say, this is the Russians' way of | 25:15 | |
sneaking up on the use of market pricing. | 25:19 | |
And I say more power to them if they can get around | 25:23 | |
inefficient quantity rationing | 25:27 | |
by imitating the capitalistic price system | 25:31 | |
but not seeming to do it directly | 25:35 | |
because you'll get in trouble in the Soviet system | 25:38 | |
if you're a mathematician or an economist | 25:42 | |
who is imitating bourgeois economics. | 25:44 | |
If you can arrive at it by the use of mathematics, | 25:47 | |
well, more power to you. | 25:50 | |
Now what's interesting is that Kantorovich, | 25:53 | |
who is, in effect, | 25:56 | |
a disbeliever in the labor theory of value, | 25:58 | |
who thinks that other resources | 26:01 | |
have to be given a proper price, | 26:03 | |
who is not a bourgeois economist, | 26:06 | |
who is not a believer in bourgeois economics, | 26:08 | |
he still professes to be a Marxian economist. | 26:11 | |
And one of the dissident Russian economists | 26:15 | |
who left the country told me he knows | 26:19 | |
Kantorovich very well, he admires him, | 26:21 | |
and my informant regards the Marxian economics as a joke, | 26:24 | |
as a albatross around the neck | 26:32 | |
of any sensible thinker in social engineering | 26:35 | |
in the Soviet Union. | 26:40 | |
But he said it was a mystery to him, | 26:42 | |
he never could get Kantorovich to admit | 26:43 | |
that the Marxian economics was the witchcraft | 26:48 | |
which was applied along with the arsenic | 26:52 | |
of linear programming to effectively kill the sheep. | 26:54 | |
And he said he was never able to work out in his own mind | 27:00 | |
whether this was tactics. | 27:03 | |
He would say to Kantorovich, well now, | 27:06 | |
we're just here together, | 27:08 | |
this is a matter of tactics with you, isn't it? | 27:09 | |
And Kantorovich would stoutly maintain no. | 27:11 | |
Well, probably we shall never know | 27:15 | |
what the true state of affairs is in that regard. | 27:19 | |
I think it will be an appointment which will do something, | 27:26 | |
which the officials in the Soviet Union will not dislike, | 27:31 | |
it will help a more rational element in socialist planning. | 27:33 | |
And so it seems to me that from that viewpoint, | 27:42 | |
it's a very good thing. | 27:44 | |
It's not a rap on the knuckles of the system | 27:45 | |
the way the Nobel award of Solzhenitsyn was | 27:48 | |
or of Pasternak, who'd written Doctor Zhivago. | 27:55 | |
It's within the mainstream of Soviet life | 28:02 | |
and yet, the better elements as a person of goodwill | 28:06 | |
might measure that are given a boost | 28:14 | |
and there won't be another equivalent occasion | 28:20 | |
for a long time to come | 28:24 | |
when a respectable jury in a neutral country like Sweden | 28:26 | |
can find a person in economic science | 28:30 | |
in the socialist countries of the world to give an award to | 28:35 | |
because he has made contributions | 28:42 | |
to the science of political economy. | 28:45 | |
I leave you then with that paradox | 28:48 | |
that in the land where it is considered | 28:50 | |
that political economy has, for the first time, | 28:53 | |
been scientifically founded, | 28:56 | |
it is practically impossible to find | 28:59 | |
a scientific political economist | 29:02 | |
unless you find a mathematician | 29:04 | |
who looks upon the matter only in terms of | 29:10 | |
the abstract logic of mathematics. | 29:13 | |
Interviewer | If you have any comments | 29:17 |
or questions for Professor Samuelson, | 29:19 | |
address them to Instructional Dynamics, Incorporated, | 29:20 | |
450 East Ohio Street, Chicago, Illinois, 60611. | 29:23 |
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