History of Political Economy In the Kingdom of Solovia: The Rise of Growth Economics at MIT, 1956–70 Mauro Boianovsky and Kevin D. Hoover 1. Growthmanship In the early 1960s the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was the native land of the “growthmen.” Its leading light, Paul Samuelson (1948a), had published a pathbreaking undergraduate textbook, Econom- ics: An Introductory Analysis. The book was striking partly because it gave pride of place to the analysis of national income and outlined the vision of the “mixed economy” in which Keynesian demand management would secure full employment and the price system operating under the usual neoclassical analysis would govern allocation (Pearce and Hoover 1995). (By the third edition this stance had gained a name: “the neoclassi- cal synthesis” [Samuelson 1955, vi].) The focus was on the short run— avoiding a replay of the Great Depression and combating the anticipated postwar slump loomed large in Samuelson’s vision. He paid no attention Correspondence may be addressed to Mauro Boianovsky, Department of Economics, Universi- dade de Brasilia, Brasilia DF, 70910-900, Brazil (e-mail:
[email protected]), and to Kevin D. Hoover, Department of Economics, Duke University, Box 90097, Durham, NC 27708- 0097 (e-mail:
[email protected]). We thank Edwin Burmeister, Peter Diamond, Pedro Gar- cia Duarte, Geoffrey Harcourt, William Nordhaus, Eytan Sheshinski, Robert Solow, and par- ticipants at the conferences “MIT and the Transformation of American Economics” (Duke University, April 26–28, 2013) and the UK HET Conference (University of Sheffield, Septem- ber 4–6, 2013), and at seminars at the University of Salento (Lecce), UFRGS (Porto Alegre), and UnB (Brasilia) for helpful comments on an earlier draft, and Matthew Panhans for efficient research assistance.