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Soc Choice Welfare 25:327356 (2005)DOI 10.1007/s00355-005-0007-9ORIGINAL PAPERPublished online: 7 December 2005
Springer-Verlag 2005IntroductionSocial Choice and Welfare has a tradition of interviewing pioneering contributors to
welfare economics and social choice theory to keep their recollections on the
formative stages of their seminal work, their current views on the past and present
states of the art, and their perspectives on the agendas to be pursued in this branch of
normative economics officially on record. Professor Paul Samuelson has been on
the list of potential scholars to be interviewed for a long time in view of his
enormously influential contributions to economics in general, and theoretical welfare economics in particular. Indeed, the purpose of these interviews would not be
served unless and until we could interview a scholar who before 1938 knew all the
relevant literature on welfare economics and just could not make coherent sense of
it, and is willing to set the record straight as only a living witness and participant
can (Samuelson (1981, p. 223)). In NovemberDecember 2000, this long overdue
interview with Professor Samuelson finally took place in his office at MIT. It started
from the list of preliminary questions I had submitted to him beforehand. Needless
to say, he had much more to offer, which coloured and enriched this interview. To
facilitate the readers better appreciation of the rich information provided by
Professor Samuelson, I added a few footnotes and provided an extensive list of
references so as to link Professor Samuelsons recollections with what the readersI am most grateful to Professor Paul Samuelson whose kind collaboration and generous sacrifice
of his time made this interview possible. Thanks are also due to Professors Kenneth Arrow, Marc
Fleurbaey, Peter Hammond, Prasanta Pattanaik, Maurice Salles and Amartya Sen, with whom I
had many conversations over the years relating to the subjects discussed in this interview. My
deep gratitude goes to Professor Nick Baigent who kindly read several drafts of this paper and
gave me detailed comments which led to the improvement of substance as well as exposition of
the final draft. Needless to say, nobody other than myself should be held responsible for any
remaining deficiency of the eventual outcome.K. Suzumura (*)
Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, Naka 2-1, Kunitachi,
Tokyo, 186-8603, JapanE-mail: [email protected]...