Voluminous, Repetitive, and Intractable
探讨了萨缪尔森对战后发展经济学文献的评价，认为该领域文献卷帙浩繁、重复且难以驾驭，并分析了这一评价在其著作中的体现。
In the late 1970s Paul Samuelson drafted the outline of a paper, never published, with a critical assessment of the theoretical innovations of postwar development economics. He found it a “vital” but essentially “not tractable” subject, with a “voluminous” and “repetitive” literature. This article discusses how that assessment fits in Samuelson’s published writings on economic development, throughout several editions of his textbook Economics, and in papers he wrote before and after that assessment. Increasing returns posed a main analytical hurdle, together with the elusive attempt to provide “laws of motion” of economic development. Samuelson’s notion of “tractability” may be traced back to Peter Medawar’s well-known definition of science as the “art of the soluble.”