Quotes from “Parable and Realism in Capital Theory: The Surrogate Production Function”

By Paul Samuelson (1962)

• Because of a Gresham’s Law that operates in economics, one’s easier expositions get more readers than one’s harder. And it is partly for this reason that such simple models or parables do, I think, have considerable heuristic value in giving insights into the fundamentals of interest theory in all its complexities.#
  EconomicsMethodology
• Solow, in the interest of empirical measurements and approximation, has been willing occasionally to drop his rigorous insistence upon a complex-heterogeneous- capital programming model; instead, by heroic abstraction, he has carried forward the seminal work of Paul H. Douglas on estimating a single production function for society and has had a tremendous influence on analysts of statistical trends in the important macro aggregates of our economy. One might almost say that there are two Solows – the orthodox priest of the MIT school and the busman on a holiday who operates brilliantly and without inhibitions in the rough-and-ready realm of empirical heuristics.#
  EconomicsHistoryCapital