{"id":13261,"date":"2015-01-03T18:03:58","date_gmt":"2015-01-03T22:03:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/etherwave.wordpress.com\/?p=13261"},"modified":"2015-01-03T18:03:58","modified_gmt":"2015-01-03T22:03:58","slug":"decisions-and-dynamics-a-case-of-ad-hoc-history-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/2015\/01\/03\/decisions-and-dynamics-a-case-of-ad-hoc-history-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"“Decisions and Dynamics”: An Ad Hoc Exploration of Intellectual and Institutional History"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Weintraub,<\/a><\/p>\n

This post offers some background information on my new paper, “Decisions and Dynamics: Postwar Theoretical Problems and the MIT Style of Economics.”<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

—<\/span><\/p>\n

The 2013 “MIT and the Transformation of American Economics” conference was one of those conferences where the invitation arrives\u00a0years\u00a0<\/em>before the event. When I agreed to attend, I thought I would just offer a complement to the conference’s focus on MIT economics with a discussion of the early history of operations research at MIT, a subject I already knew\u00a0a lot about.<\/span><\/p>\n

What I didn’t realize until the run-up to the conference was that it\u00a0was part of the annual series, which results in the publication of the annual supplementary volume to the journal\u00a0History of Political Economy<\/em>. I had already published pretty much all my material on MIT in my 2009 Science in Context<\/em>\u00a0article<\/a><\/span> on Jay Forrester’s industrial dynamics, and in my 2012 Business History Review\u00a0<\/em>article<\/a><\/span> on OR at MIT and Arthur D. Little. So, that scuppered my plans for an easy recycling\u00a0job.<\/span><\/p>\n

The obvious direction in which to go was to discuss the intellectual relationship between economics and operations research. The problem with this plan was that, while there are many interesting things to say about that relationship, the relationship at MIT\u00a0<\/em>was pretty thin throughout\u00a0the 1950s, the period I’ve studied carefully. At this point I didn’t have the time to try and suss out any subsequent relationship (if it was even substantial)\u00a0through the publications record, nor, being based in London at the time, did I have much chance to do new archival research.<\/span><\/p>\n

What did seem like a good opportunity was to engage with the thinking of the only historian to publish on the relationship between OR and economics, Phil Mirowski.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"9780521775267-template.indd\"<\/a>In\u00a0Machine Dreams<\/em> (2002), and building on work he had done with Wade Hands,* Mirowski posited that a growing orthodoxy in\u00a0American postwar economics could be divided into three branches: the “Chicago doctrine, the Cowles approach, and the MIT style” (191). He further posited that the differences between these branches could be interpreted in terms of their respective relationships with OR as it emerged from World War II.<\/span><\/p>\n

I give Mirowski a great deal of credit for being the only person to really notice that the OR-economics relationship is historically important. However, he seems to understand military\u00a0OR not as something in its own right, but as a thing that acted upon economics. Thus he draws a dubious distinction between an empirical, modestly statistical “British” version of OR (which he identifies with the Chicago school of economics) and an imperiously\u00a0theoretical “American” version of OR (which he identifies with the RAND Corporation and the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics).<\/span><\/p>\n

I could discuss\u00a0Mirowski’s argument on this point\u00a0at some length, but, for our present purposes, it is unnecessary to go into detail. Mirowski makes clear that, in his view, of the progenitors of the three branches of postwar American economics he identifies, “[MIT’s Paul] Samuelson [1915\u20132009] appears least influenced by any of the signal innovations of OR, be it of the outdated British variety or the cyborg heritage of [John] von Neumann” (226).<\/span><\/p>\n

The key trouble with this\u00a0take on MIT is that the institute’s most influential\u00a0economists were, in fact, not divorced from OR at all. As Mirowski himself relates, beginning in the late 1940s, Samuelson\u00a0began working on a project suggested by Charles Hitch (1919\u20131995), the head of the new RAND Corporation’s economics department, to illuminate the relevance of the new technique of linear programming to economics. This project continued for most of the 1950s, enveloping his junior colleague Robert Solow (b. 1924) and the Harvard economist and mathematical statistician\u00a0Robert Dorfman (1916\u20132002). At the same time, linear programming was becoming a central plank of a new body of OR theory.\u00a0Linear Programming and Economic Analysis\u00a0<\/em>was finally published in 1958.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is arguable that MIT was much more influenced by OR than Chicago, at least, ever was. The reason, then, why\u00a0Mirowski does not suppose OR to have been influential at MIT is because it was not influential in\u00a0the right way <\/em>(226):<\/span><\/p>\n

Incongruously, Samuelson managed to coauthor a commissioned text for RAND on the promise of linear programming with Robert Dorfman, an important figure in American OR, and his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 Robert Solow, a text that strains to deny any linkages to game theory and the computer, and conjures an imaginary lineage where linear programming merely “resolv[es] the problems of general equilibrium left unsolved by [19th-century French economic philosopher L\u00e9on] Walras”… Unlike Chicago, which simply ignored von Neumann and the cyborgs, and Cowles, which struggled mightily to assimilate them to the neoclassical organon, it is hard to regard MIT as doing anything other than actively trying to purge economics of any residual trace of cyborgs, which it knew was already there.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mirowski takes the absorption of the techniques of “American\u00a0OR” (allegedly, the prototypical “cyborg science”) into economics to be a kind of natural, military-funded vector for the development of models of economic markets as Walrasian calculating engines—the target of Mirowski’s book. Because MIT (rather vocally) did not favor the development of such models, the interaction that\u00a0did\u00a0<\/em>occur between linear programming and economics at MIT must be (rather grudgingly) explained away as a\u00a0puzzling\u00a0irony (231):<\/span><\/p>\n

MIT tried to have it both ways: there was nothing really new under the sun, but its epigones were nonetheless busy trying to co-opt the latest mathematical techniques to demonstrate that they were the most\u00a0au courant\u00a0<\/em>of scientists. Not the least of the ironies besetting their project was that they were housed in one of the biggest nests of cyborgs to be found on the planet—the MIT of Whirlwind, Lincoln Labs, Bolt Beranek & Newman<\/a><\/span>, and the Media Lab.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As I argued at Duke, the situation can be much more readily understood if we assume that Mirowski’s conceptualization of OR, and of its relationship to economics, simply makes no sense.<\/span><\/p>\n

Definitively, this is\u00a0not\u00a0<\/em>to say that the relationship between economics and practical mathematical techniques—some of it associated with OR, some of it not, or only later—is unimportant. Quite the contrary. Rather, if we want to understand this relationship, we would do best just to\u00a0listen to Judy Klein, who traces the key line of influence to… the Carnegie Institute of Technology (notably absent from Mirowski’s institutional troika). Unfortunately, most of her work on the subject remains unpublished, but here, in any event, is a video of her speaking about it with historian of economics Perry Mehrling:<\/span><\/p>\n