From macrodynamics to macroeconomic planning: A basic shift in Ragnar Frisch's thinking?

Abstract

When we look at the interwar history of economics from an internal point of view, we can now see that the major development that took place was that the broad intellectual current associated with the Econometric Society gained momentum and prepared the ground for transforming economics as a discipline during the first post-world War II decade. Frisch was one of its leaders. Put simply it propagated two messages: (1) Formuiate ideas mathematically whenever possible in order to avoid sloppy and inconclusive thinking. (2) Apply recent statistical techniques on economic data and develop new ones to make the facts teach as much as they possibly can.