Michael Perelman asked: >> Samuelson ended his Nobel lecture citing Davenport: "There is no reason why >> theoretical economics should be a monopoly of the reactionaries." Where did >> Davenport write/say this? Warren Samuels replied: > > The quote is from his ECONOMICS OF ENTERPRISE, at or near the end. > I believe that no such quote, in fact, exists. At the moment, there is no way for me to tell whether Samuelson actually said this. I am on the road and do not have access to the Samuelson lecture. I also do not know whether the Davenport citation was taken out of context. In any case, the text to which the quote appears to refer is at the end of Davenport's Preface to Economics of Enterprise. The last paragraph reads as follows: "It is, therefore, only upon the applications of economic science to the problems of practical progress that [I am to be] taken as a radical economist or as qualified to apply for membership among those thinkers who are facing toward a new day � the disturbers at large of the peace. Had it been within the reach of [my] power, this book should have set forth the economics of a new political and social program; as it is, the work expresses only an aspiration. Chief, however, among the monopolies that [I] would condemn is the monopoly, so far enjoyed by the reactionaries, of all authoritative economic doctrine." The Samuelson quote was presumably referring to the last sentence. Judging from the whole preface, Davenport was writing about some economists of his day, "the moderns," who sought to destroy what he regarded as the "old economics" of "the masters." This economics, he proclaimed, was flawed but not without merit. He wrote: "That our predecessors saw imperfectly was unavoidable; but that they did not see at all is incredible." He regarded "the moderns" as "reactionaries" and believed that they were wrong to think that they had all the right answers while their predecessors had none. I have not tried seriously to find out who Davenport was referring to. His main adversaries were (1) those who supported wholism, which is the antithesis of the entrepreneur point of view, and (2) those who justified the existing distribution of wealth by using marginal productivity theory. Pat Gunning