As an historian, I am somewhat appalled at the inability of economists, including those on this blog to get the history of their own discipline straight. The obsession has been with neoclassical economic’s attempt to turn economics into a physico-mathematical discipline as Walras phrased it, and the economists usually discuss this attempt within the historical context of their discipline pre-1945, with references, to Walras, Marshall, Keynes, and others.
It became clear to me over thirty years ago, that the neoclassical effort to turn economics into a prescriptive science had failed before WWII....
When I wrote my chapter on The New Paradigm in Management and Higher Education Since 1940, CUP, 1989, I focused on the methods of Operational Research developed during WWII and the Cold War, that neoclassical economics imbibed . I wrote, for example, about how the Rand Corporation working on OR problems for the US Air Force gave birth to George Dantzig’s linear programming algorithms in 1947.
Postwar military planners and the economists who worked with them at Rand believed the new toolkit would transform neoclassical economics into a prescriptive science. At Rand in 1948, the economist Kenneth Arrow used the toolkit in his work on Rational Choice Theory. The neoclassical economists Joseph Dorfman, Paul Samuelson, and Robert Solow applied linear programming to their subject as well (in Linear Programming and Economic Analysis, 1958).
Why isn’t the source of the new paradigm in OR being discussed, instead of preWWII economists.
When I wrote the second chapter in my 1989 book, “The New Paradigm Revisited,” I questioned through the critics, how the prescriptive prowess of The New Paradigm fizzled. The people I cited were primarily OR scientists themselves. That is, I note that the people whose methodologies led to the New Paradigm, questioned the effectiveness of their own discipline. The prime example of this volte-face is Russell Ackoff, who popularized OR methods in the UK in the 1960s, only to write in a 1979 article, “The future of operational research is past,” “OR problems can never be a perfect representation of a problem. They leave out the human dimension, the motivational one. [Problem solving requires] the application not only of science with a capital S, but also, all the arts and humanities we can command.”....Real-World Economics Review Blog
The New Paradigm that emerged in economic s after WWII
Robert Locke
