ABSTRACT
Paul Samuelson's comment, ‘I don’t care who writes a nation's laws – or crafts its advanced treatises – if I can write its economics textbooks’ (Nasar 1995) captures the importance of textbooks. It suggests that there is much to be learned about society and the economics profession by a consideration of its textbooks, and their evolution. In this paper I briefly consider the evolution of US economics texts from 1830 to the present. I concentrate on how their goals have changed over the years, and discuss how those goals reflected their view of what economists knew.
