I’m well into [amazon_link id=”0691156646″ target=”_blank” ]Finding Equilibrium[/amazon_link] by Till Düppe and E Roy Weintraub, about the parallel proof of existence of general equilibrium by Arrow and Debreu and separately by the less well-known and unacknowledged Lionel McKenzie. OK, it’s a special interest subject, but I’m enjoying the book, which isn’t at all inaccessible or technical.

[amazon_image id=”0691156646″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Finding Equilibrium: Arrow, Debreu, McKenzie and the Problem of Scientific Credit[/amazon_image]

Its subject is the allocation of scientific credit. McKenzie’s proof paper was published first, but he did not win the Nobel and is not recognized now as the first person to prove existence using a fixed point theorem. The book also traces in both the personal stories of the three men and the intellectual history of the time (the 1930s and 1940s) the mathematization of economics. None of the men whose histories are described here started out interested in economics – they were mathematicians (Arrow, Debreu) or physicists (McKenzie). The latter seems to have regretted ever after that he didn’t stick with physics.

I’ll do a proper review when I’ve finished. Meanwhile, it’s interesting to note the role John Hicks’s [amazon_link id=”0198282699″ target=”_blank” ]Value and Capital [/amazon_link]played in stimulating the work of at least two of the three subjects of this book. I have a copy on my shelves, bought in 1981, but it has left no trace of having made any impression on me either in my memory or in the form of margin notes. I must confess also that the bits of graduate micro where we had to plough through the general equilibrium proofs left me absolutely cold, and I had the best possible teachers (Frank Hahn and Andreu Mas-Colell). Although the point that the economy is a connected system is clearly important, the mathematical formalism seemed to me then and now worse than irrelevant – possibly dangerous.

My other first impression of this book is how much more persuasive it is in its account of the role of the Cowles Commission than the earlier work by Philip Mirowski (in [amazon_link id=”0521775264″ target=”_blank” ]Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science[/amazon_link]).  Duppe and Weintraub reject Mirowski’s argument that the Bourbaki-influenced group of economists at Cowles were inspired by their work for the US military at RAND corporation, although some (including Arrow) certainly spent their summers at RAND in Santa Monica.

Instead, they suggest that the mainly European emigré, mainly socialist scholars at Cowles (then located in Chicago) needed to prove they were not politically motivated. This was in the context of the House Un-American Activities Committee getting into full swing. There was also a wider tension in American universities between the independence of research funded by peer-allocated competitive mechanisms and doing research at other institutes in the national interest. The ambition to stay out of politics was all the more relevant given the formal equivalence of a general equilibrium solution describing a competitive market economy and a centrally planned economy (with full information, of course). There is no better description of this equivalence than Francis Spufford’s marvellous book from a few years ago, [amazon_link id=”0571225241″ target=”_blank” ]Red Plenty[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”0571225241″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Red Plenty[/amazon_image]

Anyway, to say the economists needed to avoid trouble by depoliticising their work is miles away from the Mirowski claim that the economics profession, directed by the military, became an active Cold War combatant, a claim Düppe and Weintraub describe as “a mish-mash of political pre-conceptions and historical confusions.”

This is a sub-plot in [amazon_link id=”0691156646″ target=”_blank” ]Finding Equilibrium[/amazon_link], with the main storyline being about the allocation of scientific credit. I’ll do a proper review when I’ve finished.