Economics and Engineering: Institutions, Practices, and Cultures ed. by Pedro Garcia Duarte and Yann Giraud

Abstract

Reviewed by: Economics and Engineering: Institutions, Practices, and Cultures ed. by Pedro Garcia Duarte and Yann Giraud Matthew Wisnioski (bio) Economics and Engineering: Institutions, Practices, and Cultures Edited by Pedro Garcia Duarte and Yann Giraud. Special issue, History of Political Economy 52, no. 6 ( 2020). Pp. 332. As economists' role in managing society has grown, Nobel Prize winners and science studies scholars alike have noted that economics resembles engineering. The association is sometimes pejorative; economists, like engineers, claim objectivity but serve corporate interests. At other times it is triumphant; economists, like engineers, craft intricate and beautiful systems. But it is most often a recognition of pragmatism; economists, like engineers, intervene in complex ever-changing environments. In this essential collection, Pedro Garcia Duarte and Yann Giraud assemble an international team that moves beyond metaphor to historicize the economics-engineering nexus. The volume is the result of a conference at Duke University's Center for the History of Political Economy (HOPE). It is available as a journal special issue and low-cost paperback. Its essays can be accessed individually, but the consistently excellent contributions deserve to be read as a whole. The volume's main focus is the United States, the center of post–World War II "technocratic economics," though a few chapters document European developments. The book's three parts are on engineer-economist relationships in institutions, the exchange of tools, and national contexts. Economics and Engineering does dual work as specialist exploration and accelerated introduction. Its core audience is historians of economics. Most essays investigate the flow of engineering into economics and assume knowledge of economic theory, institutions, and actors. Amy Sue Bix notably studies the reverse flow, showing how Depression-era engineering educators developed "technonomics" curricula to train engineers for management. In some of the best essays, boundaries between economics and engineering disappear and get reconfigured in new ways. Thomas Staple-ford, for instance, follows Malcolm Rorty from engineering student to [End Page 523] AT&T lineman, then "commercial engineer" to creator of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He shows that on AT&T's path to monopoly, it faced problems of quantification at the intersection of technology, management, regulation, and prediction that defied categories. Once the system stabilized, however, Rorty's innovations became the purview of economics rather than engineering. The volume offers insights into three themes in the history of technology. First, it revisits the formation and tensions of "engineering science" through an economics lens. Beatrice Cherrier and Aurélien Saïdi survey a century of "joint institutional redevelopment" at Stanford University between economics, engineering, and business amid battles over institutional identity. Multiple contributors show how hybrid activity, backed by military-industrial funding, troubled distinctions between academic and applied research. Hybridity fueled organizational innovations like joint-appointments, new fields like operations research, and philosophies such as design science while elevating the giants of technocratic economics, including Kenneth Arrow and Herbert Simon. Meanwhile in the Soviet Union, as Ivan Boldyrev explores, control engineers developed a similar interdisciplinary culture, forwarding general choice theory under state censorship. Second, Economics and Engineering spotlights the profound transformations wrought by computing, which remade both economics and engineering. Judy L. Klein explores how experts identified similarities between Keynesian feedback loops and control engineering, importing cybernetic concepts into economic decision-making. Chung-Tang Cheng similarly follows the career of econometrician Guy H. Orcutt, whose microsimulation techniques for "socioeconomic engineering" expanded alongside computing power from War on Poverty programs to strategic planning today. Third, the volume reiterates how experts used quantification in the coevolution of technical infrastructures and social orders. In electric and communications systems, devices, people, and social processes were abstracted, bringing economists and engineers into common cause. System-building and maintaining served as fertile ground for new concepts and tools. A couple of papers by my colleague Daniel Breslau and Guillaume Yon map how American and French technocrats navigated competing demands between producers and users, operators and businessmen, and socialists and capitalists, serving practical ends that also generated innovations in economic theory. Economics and Engineering emphasizes co-evolution over difference and divergence. It offers few clues as to why economics gained prestige and power while engineers were less successful in their technocratic...