That's what American kids learnt about economics

In the 1970 and 1980s, the most widely used textbook taught millions of students nothing less than communism and vulgar Marxism clad in "mathematical economics". Today we're paying the price.

Gary North explains
"... Right up until the collapse of the USSR, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson wrote in his widely assigned textbook on economics that the USSR proved that central planning could achieve high output. Economist Thomas DiLorenzo has offered two choice quotations from Samuelson's textbook.

"Every economy has its contradictions …. What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth." – 1985 edition. "Contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, the Soviet economy is proof that … a socialist command economy can function and even thrive." – 1989 edition.

Yet by 1989, it was clear to everyone that the USSR was bankrupt. Soviet Premier Gorbachev was coming to Western governments and bankers, begging for more aid.
Two years earlier, the unknown economist Judy Shelton had sounded the warning: the USSR was about to collapse economically. She got a polite hearing, but there was no bandwagon effect. Samuelson tried to head off this loss of faith among economists.
Admittedly, Samuelson may not have written these words. Maybe co-author William Nordhaus wrote them. By that stage, Samuelson had long since retired. The book's royalties had made him a multimillionaire. Intellectually speaking, he was by 1985 a very rich goldbrick. He appeared to be working, but he wasn't.
But his view on the USSR had not changed. One critic has reminded us of this.

In the 1973 edition of his famous textbook Economics he predicted that though the Soviet Union then had a per capita income roughly half that of the United States, it would catch up to the United States in per capita income by 1990, and almost certainly would by 2015 because of its superior economic system.

Paul Samuelson was the premier goldbrick in the economics profession in the second half of the twentieth century. He appeared to be working hard, but his output was substandard. He got very rich teaching millions of freshmen how to have careers as goldbricks: how to give the illusion of valuable work, but never producing anything that could be applied profitably to the economy. Keynesianism is goldbrick economics..."
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Comment: Samuelson killed not only economics, worse: by killing economics he killed a large part of our civilization. The hardest hit nation was America, next in line was Britain and Europe. Will these becons of light ever recover? When I go to a country I look around in the bookstores and when I see, as I did last year in Argentina, that Samuelson is still in the shelves, I know that there is not yet any hope for this country. My advice: invest in countries where you find Mises on the shelves. There is probably no better long-term indicator thant this one.