Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/149694 
Year of Publication: 
2013
Series/Report no.: 
CHOPE Working Paper No. 2013-03
Publisher: 
Duke University, Center for the History of Political Economy (CHOPE), Durham, NC
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.
Subjects: 
Cowles Commission
activity analysis
linear programming
general equilibrium theory
von Neumann
Koopmans
Dantzig
fixed point theorems
JEL: 
B2
C0
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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