UPDATE: To be clear, I think Samuelson was an amazing character; that’s what I meant below when I say, “They don’t make ’em like this anymore.” Since he died, there’s really nobody left who can criticize Bohm-Bawerk the way he did. Sure it’s fine to debate Krugman, but Krugman doesn’t know Austrian capital & interest theory the way Samuelson did.

Ah, at long last! Corey Sheahan (prompted by Stanislaw Kwiatkowski) was able to go through the Samuelson archives at Duke and dig out his referee reports on my papers on capital & interest theory. (I couldn’t find them after I had moved, so I was worried they were lost forever. Also, in case it’s not clear, Samuelson disclosed his identity to me in both reports.) Here are citations to the two papers involved:

Murphy, Robert P. “Interest and the Marginal Product of Capital: A Critique of Samuelson.” Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2007), pp. 453-464.

————–“Dangers of the One-Good Model: Böhm-Bawerk’s Critique of the ‘Naïve Productivity Theory’ of Interest.” Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Vol. 27, No. 4 (December 2005), pp. 375-382.

I don’t have handy versions of the published papers, but you can get the basic idea from the Appendix in my dissertation.

Anyway here are Samuelson’s letters. Be sure to read the one from January 2006. They don’t make ’em like this anymore.