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I have a suggestion for an interesting exercise (once suggested to me  
by Edward Nell).  If the student has access to the relevant materials,  
look through Samuelson's text and try to find out in what year and  
edition he first introduced the concept.  Samuelson was once an  
advocate of functional finance.  He has papers from as late as the early  
sixties that would sound utterly radical if issued in today's climate of  
balanced budgets and talk of "what to do with the surplus" and  
proposals to pay down the debt.  In any case, by the late sixties I think  
the concept is in Samuelson's text. So it must be somewhere in that  
mid sixties region that the concept came to the fore. Of course, the  
general idea goes way back.   
 
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