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Siting the New Economic Science: The Cowles Commission’s Activity Analysis Conference of June 1949

Author

Listed:
  • Till Düppe

    (University of Quebec at Montreal)

  • E. Roy Weintraub

    (Duke University)

Abstract

In the decades following WWII, the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics came to represent new technical standards that informed most advances in economic theory. The public emergence of this community was manifest at a conference held in June 1949 titled Activity Analysis of Production and Allocation. Our history of this event situates the Cowles Commission among the institutions of post-war science in-between National Laboratories and the supreme discipline of Cold War academia, mathematics. Although the conference created the conditions under which economics, as a discipline, would transform itself, the participants themselves had little concern for the intellectual battles that had defined prewar university economics departments. The conference bore witness to a new intellectual culture in economic science based on shared scientific norms and techniques un-interrogated by conflicting notions of the meaning of either science or economics.

Suggested Citation

  • Till Düppe & E. Roy Weintraub, 2013. "Siting the New Economic Science: The Cowles Commission’s Activity Analysis Conference of June 1949," Working Papers 0040, European Historical Economics Society (EHES).
    • Handle: RePEc:hes:wpaper:0040
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Cowles Commission; activity analysis; linear programming; general equilibrium theory; von Neumann; Koopmans; Dantzig; fixed point theorems;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • B2 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought since 1925
    • C0 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - General

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