The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

by Saifedean Ammous

We saw in Chapter 4 how Samuelson predicted that ending World War II would cause the biggest recession in world history, only for one of the biggest booms in U.S. history to ensue. But it gets better: Samuelson wrote the most popular economics textbook of the postwar era, Economics: An Introductory Analysis, which has sold millions of copies over six decades.22 Levy and Peart23 studied the different versions of Samuelson's textbook to find him repeatedly presenting the Soviet economic model as being more conducive to economic growth, predicting in the fourth edition in 1961 that the Soviet Union's economy would overtake that of the United States sometime between 1984 and 1997. These forecasts for Soviets overtaking the United States continued to be made with increasing confidence through seven editions of the textbook, until the eleventh edition in 1980, with varying estimates for when the overtaking would occur. In the thirteenth edition, published in 1989, which hit the desks of university students as the Soviet Union was beginning to unravel, Samuelson and his then‐co‐author William Nordhaus wrote, “The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.”

Samuelson's Economics Textbook predictions