(Econo)metrics: from Political Arithmetic
to the Probability Revolution
Piazza Navona, 62
Quantifying the Social Sciences: An Historical and Comparative Perspective
Symptoms and Measurement: Studying Economic Reality in France and Italy Before WWI
In the late eighties of the nineteenth century, scholars such as the Austrian Franz Xaver von Neumann-Spallart (1837-1888) and French Alfred de Foville (1842-1918) made important contributions that favored the rapprochement between economics and statistics. The economic depression in the seventies had strengthend scholar’s awareness of the intrinsic instability of the economic system which was born with the industrial revolution. This led economists to use the information and statistical methods available to measure and predict the behavior of economic activity. The scholars engaged in the new discipline behaved, metaphorically, as the doctor who performs diagnostics on the human body; they performed interpretation of signs: economic semiology. This line of research witnesses the need of the economists to bridge the gap between theory and economic reality.
The Early Years of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics. Price and Crop Outlook Studies, 1922-1930
Eric Chancellier (University of Lorraine)
- Historians should explain how a paradigm supported by a small group of people (the Cowles Commission), well trained in mathematics, probability and statistics, was able to convince a global community of economists, who were totally ignorant or allergic to any consideration of randomness and of probability calculus, that the solution to economic issues went through structural and probabilistic modeling. Only a bundle of reasons related to the specific scientific regimes of WW2 and of the Cold War can explain this.
- In 1859, the statistical physics of Maxwell and Boltzmann, as well as the Darwinian theory of the evolution of species, revolutionized these two disciplines by giving chance - a chance which was not epistemic, but ontologic (or objective, as Cournot said) - a constitutive place in their theory. Following the studies of the Bielefeld group on the probabilistic revolution, and some other historical works, it seems that the economic thought did not experience a similar revolution either in the nineteenth century, nor in the 1930s with the IES.
Francisco Louçã, ISEG-UECE, Lisboa
Typically, economics addressed these oscillations in the general equilibrium framework, and the distinction between an impulse system and a propagation apparatus was instrumental for such purpose. Yet, many econometricians suspected and discussed this framework, even some of the more unsuspected lawyers of general equilibrium.
These discussions highlight early approaches of complexity in economics.