Protocols of War and the Driving Force of Modeling Strategy

Judy Klein of Mary Baldwin College will research and document the history of economic models and modeling strategies that were key to new developments in macroeconomic theory in the latter half of the twentieth century. Her project will examine how US military needs during World War II and the Cold War steered engineers and applied mathematicians to an economic way of thinking about scarce resources, including limited computational resources, and how economists subsequently incorporated that mathematics. Military specifications for rational decision-making protocols included formal acknowledgement of uncertainty and computable rules of action. What procedures did the model makers devise to deal with scarce computing resources and how did economics reach a point where modeling strategy became a key driving force to the development of economic theories of how the world works?