----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 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. ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]