Abstract
The importance of the rise of Operations Research (OR) for the postwar development of economics is a theme entirely absent from both the history of science and the history of economics. This paper explores a number of theses which will help to rectify that situation: (1) the existing history of OR, including the landmark paper by Fortun and Schweber (1993), stands in need of revision; (2) the neoclassical tradition in America had encountered some daunting obstacles in the 1930s; (3) the recruitment of a generation of economists into OR during World War II created a possible way out of this impasse; and (4) differences in analytical content of various schools of OR can be mapped on to postwar differences between schools of American neoclassical economics and, in particular, the Chicago School and the Cowles Commission. This narrative constitutes the outline of a thesis that World War II marked the second large-scale incursion of physicists into neoclassical economics.
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