There is a very interesting post over at the Organizations and Markets blog about the relationship between Josef Schumpeter and Paul Samuelson. Samuelson, who died Sunday at the age of 94, is the Nobel Prize winning economist who shaped and then dominated the introductory textbook market for decades. In one of his more audacious moments, he famously proclaimed, “Let those who will, write the nation’s laws if I can write its textbooks.” He also was the driving force behind formal economics modeling (read: mathematical models).
His dissertation advisor, Josef Schumpeter, was also an amazing and amazingly-influential economist of a different stripe. Even without the formal modeling (and perhaps due to the absence), his work has become central to the recent revival of the economics of innovation and entrepreneurship. You could do worse over the break than to pick up a copy of the recent biography, Prophet of Innovation.
I know I did.