Did Alfred Lotka acknowledge his influence on Paul Samuelson?
I have now a convenient solution to write my blog posts (see here), so I finally “put on paper” things I had in store.
(for a better formatted version of this blog post, with footnotes mentioning the sources I cite, see here)
This is a short one: a piece of archive documenting the intellectual connection between Alfred Lotka and Paul Samuelson, extracted from my PhD dissertation [in French].
Lotka (1880–1849) is a key figure in mathematical biology, Samuelson (1915–2009) is a key figure in mathematical economics. I argue in my PhD dissertation that Lotka influenced Samuelson (building up on Weintraub here).
But we might be curious: was Lotka aware of this influence? What would have he made of it?
Samuelson hints that he entertained a correspondance with Lotka (Samuelson 1976). Samuelson also explains he personally attended seminar sessions at the American Economic Association, where Lotka was presenting:
“Early on I did have math biological interests: actuarial methods applied to auto replacement; Verhulst Pearl logistic growth theories; Lotka Sharpe and Kuczynski demography; Cole Keyfitz demography; Lotka Volterra predator prey models; Fisher Haldane Wright genetics. […] I knew Lotka personally and was amused by his arguments with Gabriel Preinich at the American Economic Association. I knew all the 100+ papers in his bibliography” .
And indeed, I found in the papers of Lotka archived at Princeton that Lotka had a copy of Samuelson’s “The stability of equilibrium : comparative statics and dynamics” (Samuelson 1943), which introduces for the first time in economics the principle of comparative statics, applied to Keynesian economics.
On the cover of this reprint, that Samuelson had sent him, Lotka had penciled: “Phys Biol Chapter 6”, indicating his intention to use this material for the revision of his Elements of Physical Biology, which he was working on. (Lotka did not complete this second edition)
There is a second interesting piece in Lotka’s archives: a letter he received in 1943 from George Lundberg, the President of the American Sociological Society. Lundberg writes:
Permit me to remark again […] upon the tremendous stimulus which I received from your ELEMENTS OF PHYSICAL BIOLOGY. I should like to attempt a work of that type in sociology someday unless in the meantime someone more competent does so. .
We can follow the thoughts of Lotka, as if peering above his shoulder when he read this letter, with the hand written note Lotka left in the margin of the last sentence:
Richardson ? Samuelson Econometrica
Here we see that Lotka had identified Samuelson as his intellectual follower in economics. On a personal note, it was a pleasure I could send a copy of this document to Paul Samuelson in 2007.
A full history remains to be written on the relationships Samuelson entertained with biology. I hope an historian is set to this task!
Originally published at raw.githubusercontent.com.
