"When I was a student at the University of Chicago, where I was a direct student of in the classroom, and an indirect student of Frank Knight, I could not learn why price should equal marginal cost. Even when I got to Harvard in 1935, I went around asking everybody: “What is the proof that this is so?” Of course, I did not know the 1892–1893 work of Vilfredo Pareto in which he essentially shows that a perfectly competitive equation system gives you the necessary and sufficient condition, not for ethical optimality—he was always a little slippery on that problem—but for what came to be called Pareto optimality so that there is no avoidable deadweight loss. I think I had most to learn from Abba Lerner, although I, of course, worked it out for myself."
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Paul Samuelson, in Kotaro Suzumura, "An interview with Paul Samuelson: welfare economics, “old” and “new”, and social choice theory", Soc Choice Welfare 25:327–356 (2005).
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics
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Fundamental theorems of welfare economics
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