The Cowles Summer Research Conferences on Economics and Statistics 1935-1940: Building a Community for Mathematical Economics and Econometrics

The Cowles Commission for Research in Economics held six month-long summer research conferences in Colorado Springs from 1935 to 1940 that, together with the closely-related meetings of the Econometric Society, created a forum for mathematically-inclined economic theorists and economic statisticians to interact and present their research for constructive criticism by a sympathetic audience, at a time when only a small minority of the economics discipline was receptive to such research. Unlike the Econometric Society meetings, which like other conferences of other associations lasted only a weekend with parallel multi-paper sessions, the Cowles conferences lasted a month with half a day per paper, plus public lectures. Extensive summaries of the papers, averaging three single-spaced pages per paper, were published in the annual conference volume, with many of the full papers submitted to Econometrica (a journal founded with Alfred Cowles?s personal guarantee to pay the journal?s annual deficit). The conferences attracted leading mathematical economists, economist theorists and statisticians from Europe as well as from the United States. At a time of very limited US Government funding of research (except in agriculture), Alfred Cowles 3rd played a crucial role in sponsoring the mathematical turn in economics and economic statistics, comparable to the role of Alfred Loomis in American physics in the 1930s. Cowles?s Annual Research Conferences on Economics and Statistics brought together the leading participants in that mathematical turn for intensive and protracted intellectual exchanges (far beyond what was possible in short parallel sessions at the brief Econometric Society meetings). The Colorado years of the Cowles Commission and especially its summer conferences helped build a community of scholars devoted to ?the advancement of economic theory in relation to mathematics and statistics? that extended beyond the creation of an influential institution, the Cowles Commission at the University of Chicago (1939-55) and its successor, the Cowles Foundation at Yale. JEL classification: B23