anti-samuelson, anti-mankiw?

I recently discovered Linder's 2 volume (4 in the German edition) Anti-Samuelson (1977), a virtual line-by-line critique of Samuelson's popular Principles of Economics textbook. For those not familiar with Samuelson or his work, S is one of the most prolific post-World War II economists in terms of using formal (mathematical) methods to study economic problems. It influenced scores of economic students. The Nobel Commitee's biography of him describes the impact of his work:

His Economics: An Introductory Analysis, first published in 1948, has become the best selling economics textbook of all time. The textbook has sold more than a million copies and has been translated into French, German, Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Arabic. It is now in its fifth edition. "The book's emphasis on different themes has changed with the changing of the nation's economic problems," wrote Business Week in 1959. "The first edition was dominated by the end-of-the-war worry that widespread unemployment would return... later editions put growing stress on fiscal and monetary controls over inflation. In the later editions Samuelson has worked toward what he calls a 'neoclassical synthesis' of ancient and modern economic findings. Briefly, his synthesis is that nations today can successfully control either depression or inflation by fiscal and monetary policies... Some economists feel that Samuelson's book... is really his greatest contribution. It has gone a long way toward giving the world a common economic language." (Source: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1970/samuelson-bio.html)

I very recently wrote a post about some of Linder's more recent work here. He's a very interesting scholar. His website is here.

Talking with a few of my fellow grad students at UMass, we reflected on the fact that Mankiw has effectively displaced S's text as the standard Principles of Economics text at the top schools -- indeed, it is #1 in terms of economics textbook sales now over S's book. As such, it seems fair to think that a parallel work would rise to criticize it as those students at Princeton had done in the 70s. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

But. A a quick google search of "anti-Mankiw" gives a Mankiw blog post from 2007 as the first link. See it here. The critique Mankiw mentions come from the post-autistic school of economics, a critique that is fundamentally about the argument that mainstream economics is divorced from reality to a point that it loses any practical relevance (Elisa, I'm not sure if you still read this blog but I believe you mentioned this to me 5 or 6 years ago!).

At any rate, check out the link, and let me know if you're interested in writing with me a 2-volume, 350 pg. per volume, line-by-line critique of Mankiw as an instrument of bourgeois ideology. This is the closest thing I could find!

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