| Sumario: | This article presents a speech delivered by economist Paul A. Samuelson at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in New York on December 27, 1961. Within economics, economists rate writers of the past in a quite different order than does the outside world. And, as far as economic analysis itself is concerned, the present generation of economists gives a quite different ranking than did earlier generations of economists. In many ways, the history of a subject's technical analysis is easier to write precisely because it need not involve the determination of social influencing. The split between the inside look of a subject in terms of the logic and experience of its professional development and its implications for the man-in-the-street or the academician down the campus, is well organized. Finally, one must never make the fatal mistake in the history of ideas of requiring of a notion that it be true. For that discipline, the slogan must be: the customer is always right. Its objects are what men have believed, and if truth has been left out, so much the worse for truth, except for the curiously-undifficult task of explaining why truth does not sell more successfully than anything else.
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