ABSTRACT
I look at all the insights and sophisticated developments in the theory and application of optimal forest rotation determination that have occurred since that time. And I ask: did Samuelson’s paper inspire or make possible any of them, and I conclude that it did not. The sense is that it was written by a famous mainstream economist to show forest economists how things should be done, and the fact that it is still often quoted suggests that some authors believe that that was indeed what he achieved. In fact the paper comes to acknowledge that a forest economist not only found the correct solution to a forest economics problem, but that he formalized the technique of discounted cash flow appraisal more than half a century before Irving Fisher (1907) published his work on the subject.
