Introduction:

From “Economics as Engineering”

to “Economics and Engineering”
Pedro Garcia Duarte and Yann Giraud

The Transformation of Economics

into an Engineering Science:
From Analogies to Interactions
In recent years, economists, who in the past had mostly insisted on their
discipline’s strength as a rigorous social science, have turned to its larger
role in transforming society. As early as 2002, Alvin Roth, the Stan-
ford-educated economist who received the Nobel memorial prize in 2012,
has claimed that members of his community should think of themselves
as engineers rather than scientists. By this he meant that they should not
be interested solely in the making of theoretical models but also in con-
fronting these models with the complexities of real-life situations, which
is what engineering is allegedly about. He pointed to the rise of the new
subfield of market design, which he had helped develop, as characteristic
of an engineer’s stance and provided several examples of engineering
practices applied to economics: the design of labor clearinghouses—such
as the entry-level labor market for American physicians—and that of the
Federal Communications Commission spectrum auctions (Roth 2002).

We want to thank the Center for the History of Political Economy and Duke University Press
for their support, as well as the many referees who helped us during the editorial process. Yann
Giraud wishes to point out that his research has been supported by the project Labex MME-DII
(ANR11–LBX-0023–01). Pedro Duarte acknowledges the financial support of the Institute for
Advanced Studies, at the Université de Cergy-Pontoise, for visiting professorships (2016, 2018)
that were critical for the shaping of this joint project.
History of Political Economy 52 (annual suppl.) DOI 10.1215/00182702-8717898
Copyright 2020 by Duke University Press
 Introduction 11

More recently, the development economist and MIT scholar Esther

Duflo, another recent Nobel awardee, built on Roth’s (2002) and Abhijit
Banerjee’s (2007: chap. 3) contributions and reiterated the need for econo-
mists to venture outside academe. But she went further and introduced, in
addition to the engineer, a new character: that of the plumber. For her,
while scientists attempt to seek epistemic truths using theoretical models
and engineers design the machine through which these models can be
translated into policy devices, plumbers are the ones who are responsible
for making that machine work. For instance, while economic scientists
have shown that school vouchers help improve the education level of a
population, it is the role of economic engineers to design a voucher system
and an incentive structure that helps encourage the use of vouchers. In their
turn, economic plumbers are the ones who will work with the population
in order to make sure that those vouchers will be addressed to those, situ-
ated in a particular environment, who need them the most (Duflo 2017).
For both Roth and Duflo, engineering is the practice of designing policy
interventions that requires a certain degree of tinkering in the application
of preexisting theoretical models in order to adapt them to real-life practi-
calities. For them, the engineering and scientific aspects of economics
complement each other. By contrast, the macroeconomist Gregory Mankiw
(2006: 29) identifies a tension between science and engineering, contrast-
ing two depictions of economics: that of a scientific endeavor, according to
which “economists formulate theories with mathematical precision, collect
huge data sets on individual and aggregate behavior, and exploit the most
sophisticated statistical techniques to reach empirical judgments that are
free of bias and ideology (or so we like to think),” with that of engineering.
After all, “God put macroeconomists on earth not to propose and test ele-
gant theories but to solve practical problems.” Mankiw uses this dichotomy
as a foil for him to appraise the development of macroeconomics and to
indict new classical macroeconomics as a science while praising the engi-
neering stance of New Keynesian macroeconomics. For him, while the
rational expectation theory and calibration techniques conceived by Robert
Lucas, Edward Prescott, and their allies exhibit the rigor of science, New
Keynesian economics, while less accurate from a scientific standpoint, has
the advantage of being easily amenable to policymaking. To gain relevance
for policy purposes, therefore, economics as engineering needs to momen-
tarily stray from scientific accuracy.
While Roth, Duflo, and Mankiw located the engineer’s attitude at the
policymaking level, other economists stationed it at the theoretical model
12 Pedro Garcia Duarte and Yann Giraud

building. Speaking of his “neoclassical growth model,” the macroecono-

mist Robert Solow told our colleague Verena Halsmayer (2014: 241) that it
could be considered engineering “in the design sense.” What Solow meant
was that this model could be conceived as a sort of prototype for more com-
plex measuring devices, subject to simple manipulation, which enables “the
modeler-economist to enter a new, unexplored, world” (241). In that case,
the engineering aspect is enhanced by the fact that Solow’s own institution,
MIT, is an engineering school and that the model was partly intended as a
pedagogical device for the students, most of whom were future engineers.1
Solow’s model is not the only macroeconomic device that was built using
engineering techniques. In fact, as Esther-Mirjam Sent (1997) has shown,
all branches of postwar macroeconomics have been using them. New clas-
sical macroeconomics emerged from the appropriation by Lucas et al. of
Richard Bellman’s dynamic programming and Kálmán filtering (Judy
Klein and Marcel Boumans, in this volume, develop and qualify the history
of this appropriation). These economists may well believe that they helped
their field become a science, yet they did so using engineering mathematics.
Not only practitioners but also historians of the discipline have
addressed this engineering characterization of economics. Writing for a
history of social science audience and building on the HOPE volume she
had coedited with Malcolm Rutherford in 1998, Mary Morgan provided
an account of the development of twentieth-century economics as that of
an engineering science, arguing that it implied two things: first, that eco-
nomics “came to rely on a certain precision of representation of the eco-
nomic world, along with techniques of quantitative investigation and exact
analysis that were alien to the experience of nineteenth-century of eco-
nomics”; second, that it is “best characterized as a science of applications
and implies a technical art, one that relies on tacit knowledge and decid-
edly human input” (Morgan 2003: 276).2
Michel Armatte (2010) expanded on Morgan’s argument and wrote a
book-length depiction of the transformation of political economy into an

1. Economics was a compulsory subject for all MIT undergraduates, even those who were
not enrolled in a social science program.
2. In fact, Morgan was not the first historian of economics to use the “economics as engi-
neering” analogy. In his 1979 presidential address to the History of Economics Society, Crau-
furd Goodwin (1980: 619), then editor of this journal, wrote: “If economists do insist on taking
models for the development of their subject from elsewhere rather than constructing new ones,
a closer analogy than the physical sciences may be engineering. Much of what economists do is
more comparable to the designing and fabricating of structures for social use than to the labo-
ratory work of the physicist.”
 Introduction 13

engineering science, covering several national experiences and various

subfields—from econometrics to environmental economics. In his
account, “economics as engineering” is characterized by the development
of a unified body of doctrine (neoclassical economics), a new way of using
evidence (quantitative and mathematical), the inclusion of economic the-
ory into a socioeconomic environment (a new management of economic
activities), and the rise of a new kind of economic expertise (in think
tanks and other institutions).
While the economics as engineering analogy seems to work well as a
backdrop to articulate a relatively cohesive narrative about the disci-
pline’s development, it also undermines some of the actual tensions that
have existed between economics and engineering in that period. In the
article mentioned above, Sent (1997: 277) summed it up by writing that
“while economists attempted to develop scientific knowledge . . . engi-
neers are practical people who are concerned with getting specific jobs
done and who seek satisfactory solutions in the face of complexities and
uncertainties. Engineers are known to use trial-and-error empiricisms
and rule-of-thumb techniques that could not be generalized to a wide
range of problems.”
Most of these accounts of economics as engineering, whether written
from an economist’s or a historian’s perspective, share a number of com-
mon traits: they point to the fact that the depiction of economics as a sci-
ence leaves aside some important practical aspects involved in the appli-
cation of economic knowledge to real-life situations; the necessity to have
recourse to tinkering and trial-and-error procedures, both in modeling
practices and in the use of these models for policy purposes; the charac-
terization of economic issues as necessitating complex computational pro-
cesses; and, more generally, the characterization of the economy as a
machine. However, there is room for deeper scrutiny. For instance, while
Roth characterizes the transformation of economics into an engineering
science as a relatively recent—post-1980s—feature of the discipline, Mor-
gan and Armatte locate that transformation at the turn of the twentieth
century. Also, while Roth and Mankiw circumscribe the engineering atti-
tude to certain aspects of the discipline, that of policymaking and market
design, others consider the analogy as a more general take on economics.
More important, what is more often left aside is the actual interaction
between economists and engineers. How did the latter react to econo-
mists’ appropriation of their tools, and were they themselves interested in
taking into account economic knowledge as part of their professional
14 Pedro Garcia Duarte and Yann Giraud

activities?3 This points to the fact that economics as engineering, taken as

an analogy, while insightful, may not be the best way to grasp or assess,
from a historical standpoint, the presumed transformation of economics
into an engineering science. To do this, we might turn instead to the his-
tory of economics and engineering: accounts of how these two types of
knowledge—and the communities who produce them—have interacted
in various institutional and national contexts.

Historicizing “Economics and Engineering”:

A HOPE Conference
The encounters between economics and engineering have been seldom
documented in the existing historical literature, yet there are hints that
these interactions may have been more significant than is currently
acknowledged. Besides modern macroeconomics, one instantiation most
familiar to historians of economics is the contribution by mid-nine-
teenth-century French engineers to the development of what would be later
termed “microeconomics.”4 Robert Ekelund and Robert Hébert have
argued on many occasions (most notably Ekelund and Hébert 1999) that
Jules Dupuit, an engineer at the École des Ponts et Chaussées, should be
considered the founder of neoclassical economics. However, because they
look at past engineering from the perspective of modern economics, read-
ing Dupuit’s writings in search of evidence of antecedents to contemporary
economic verities, the authors do not say much about the context in which
the practices of French engineers occurred and their relation to the existing
economists’ community. On the other hand, when we move away from the
economist’s perspective and look at the literature in engineering, there is
ample evidence that economic matters have constituted an object of inter-
est for engineers since the end of the nineteenth century, mostly at the
educational level—the “engineering economics” class that was compul-
sory in most US engineering programs (see Bix, this volume). After World
War II, some engineers, like Arnold Tustin and A. W. Phillips, began to be
interested in analyzing the economy as a mechanical system, inventing
paper tools and physical devices to do so (see Klein, this volume). Some of

3. While pointing to these divergences between economists and engineers, Sent (1997) does
not really attempt to put them in historical perspective.
4. Since that time, an important feature of the engineering curriculum in France is the strong
background in mathematics. Not surprisingly, there has been a long tradition of studying the
French engineers turned economists as originating a branch of mathematical economics. For a
panorama of this literature, see Mosca 1998.
 Introduction 15

these attempts have been addressed in the existing literature (see, for
instance, Morgan 2012 on the Phillips machine), but, on the whole, not
much is known about the extent to which they actually participated in the
transformation of economics or the reasons they failed to do so.
There also exist contributions standing outside disciplinary history that
can be interpreted as implicit accounts of the interaction between engineer-
ing and economics (among other social sciences). Guy Alchon’s (1985) his-
tory of planning in the 1920s depicts how social scientists collaborated
with business managers in the creation of an American branch of planning,
which the author labels “technocratic progressivism” (see also Layton
1986). The thought collective he describes associates institutionalist econ-
omists like Wesley Mitchell and Taylorites like the engineer Morris L.
Cooke, who would later head the Rural Electrification Administration
under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legislature. Likewise, Erickson
et al. (2013) told the story of how the Cold War transformed rationality,
first seen as a human faculty associated with the enlightenment to its mod-
ern algorithmic, formal, and mechanistic version. Their narrative situates
that change at the crossroads between engineering, operations research,
economics, management, psychology, and the political sciences. In a quite
similar vein, William Thomas’s (2015) account of the sciences of policy in
Britain and the United States during the twentieth century tells the story
of how the nascent disciplines of operations research and management
science—both neighboring to economics in some way—were grounded in
military planning and engineering practices. All those contributions evoke
economics knowledge to some extent, but because the economics disci-
pline is not at the center of their narrative, not much is said about disci-
plinary exchanges between engineering and economics and how the latter
has been transformed in the process.
Finally, several works in the history of engineering have sought to por-
tray American engineers’ conflicted relation to techno-capitalism over the
past century. David Noble (1977) depicts their transformation into busi-
ness managers during the first decades of the twentieth century, pointing
to their role in the rise and defense of corporate capitalism. On the other
hand, Matthew Wisnioski’s (2012) study of engineering in the 1960s ana-
lyzes the debates among engineers during a period where technology
ceased to be seen as an engine of liberation and progress. In response to
this challenge, engineers became “socio-technologists” who would help
society adjust to technological change. These stories do not specifically
address economics as a discipline, yet they deal with the engineers’ vari-
16 Pedro Garcia Duarte and Yann Giraud

ous visions of the economic system and their take on subjects such as
growth and sustainability.
Although fragmentary, the preceding elements were enough for us to
think that a more systematic investigation into the economics-engineering
nexus would constitute a useful addition to the history of both disciplines.
Under the patronage of the Center for the History of Political Economy
and Duke University Press, we invited an eclectic group of historians of
economics, historians of science, and engineering studies scholars to
write papers on this topic. The resulting conference was held April 5–6,
2019, in the Breedlove Conference Room of the Perkins Library at Duke
University. The present volume collects most of the papers that were pre-
sented there, with a foreword by the engineering scholar David Blockley
and closing comments by the researcher responsible for drawing our inter-
est in this topic in the first place, Mary Morgan.

Identifying the Economics-Engineering Nexus:

The Historiographical Challenge
We may not need to properly define “economics” and “engineering” in
order to retrace the history of their relation in the twentieth century. Yet,
because we need to start somewhere, we must at least identify the sites
where economics and engineering knowledge are produced and the com-
munities that produce them. Traditionally, historians of economics have
studied the sort of economics that has been produced within academe and
whose output is mostly found in treatises or scientific articles—but the
practice turn has challenged this and opened up what we understand by
economics (see Boumans and Duarte 2019). The question of whether eco-
nomics taken in that sense is a unified field is subject to debate (see, for
instance, Davis 2019), but at least when considered from an academic per-
spective, it is one discipline, and a relatively structured one—with journal
rankings, JEL codes, and so on.
On the other hand, while there certainly exists engineering knowledge
produced within academe, in engineering schools and departments, it is
just a small part of what engineering is about. Blockley (2010) observes
that engineering includes many subdisciplines, noting that in the UK
alone there are more than thirty different professional institutions that
qualify engineers. In his foreword to this volume, he seeks less to define
engineering than to characterize it in opposition to science: whereas sci-
ence is about “knowing,” engineering is about “doing” things, that is
 Introduction 17

designing and/or building a device—not necessarily a physical one—in

order to satisfy human needs, those of a client, for instance. But while in
the traditional conception of science, knowledge is created at an abstract
level and then “applied” to solve practical problems, in engineering
knowledge creation occurs as the by-product of practice itself (see also
Vincenti 1990).5 This horizontal character of engineering, as opposed to
the more vertical nature of applied science, must be taken into account
when we analyze knowledge transfer from engineering to economics. To
do this, we must first ask ourselves what sort of engineering we are talking
about—mechanical engineering, civil engineering, chemical engineering,
electrical engineering, systems engineering—and, second, look outside
academe. For instance, when we analyze the use of “engineering mathe-
matics” in modern macroeconomics, we need to take into account that
engineering mathematics itself has a history and that it may have evolved
in accordance with the set of practical issues in which it was grounded.
Borrowing one’s mathematics from control engineering or from informa-
tion engineering will therefore produce different sorts of macroeconomic
knowledge (see Boumans, this volume).
Reciprocally, the more we study the relation between economics and
engineering the more we realize that our traditional vision of economics
as, first and foremost, an academic discipline might itself be unsatisfying.
Admittedly, economists mostly identify themselves as academics. In the
United States, even economists who act as experts for governments, busi-
nesses, and other sorts of nonacademic institutions draw their legitimacy
for doing so from their success in a highly competitive academic envi-
ronment (Fourcade 2009). The so-called applied turn in economics did
not really compromise the discipline’s academic anchorage. The typical
applied economist may occasionally venture outside the university, but
doing so is not a necessary condition to define one as an applied economist
because most of her activities (the analysis of natural and controlled exper-
iments and the building of databases, for instance) take place in the con-
fines of the research center (Backhouse and Cherrier 2017).
However, when we move to the study of economics and engineering,
we come up with a reversed situation. While there are occasional instances

5. The notion of applied science has been a controversial one among historians of technol-
ogy and on characterizing engineering as such (see Alexander 2012). Besides, the reasoning
style and the knowledge engineers produce possess elements that cannot be reduced to verbal
descriptions and, thus, depend on a mental process that is visual and nonverbal, according to
Eugene Ferguson (1992).
18 Pedro Garcia Duarte and Yann Giraud

when economists have absorbed engineering knowledge without having

to do fieldwork, most of the engineering-economics nexus is located out-
side academe, and, at times, it does not even involve the sort of profession-
als we commonly identify as “economists.” In other terms, the history of
that nexus cannot be fully grasped without having a fairly extensive view
of what economics is. Therefore, it is no wonder that many contributions
in this volume do not deal with academic economics, or when they do so,
they examine their practices in nonacademic settings. For instance, rather
than studying “price theory,” Daniel Breslau’s and Guillaume Yon’s
respective chapters deal with “pricing,” a practice that relates only partly
to theory, although it quite unintentionally ended up producing knowledge
that the economics profession has come to identify as part of its own
canon (the Ramsey-Boiteux pricing, for instance).
Seen from the perspective of engineering history rather than the history
of economics, there are two main reasons why historicizing the econom-
ics-engineering nexus is particularly challenging. The first is that engi-
neering has evolved to display “extreme diversity of . . . jobs and realiza-
tions” that has clear national traits, as the engineering historian Antoine
Picon (2004: 422) argued:
Engineering looks more like a continent marked by striking contrasts
than like a unified field. On this continent, no self-evident link seems to
exist between the organization of the profession and the various activi-
ties engineers are involved in. In this context, it may be tempting either
to define the engineer through his social identity and aspirations or to
limit oneself to a relatively narrow domain of technological expertise.
The second reason is that engineers have attempted, since the Renais-
sance, to ground their practice on science and at the same time to distance
themselves from “down-to-earth practitioners” (Picon 2004: 429), which
implies that there is “some kind of intermediate know-how” between “the
formalized knowledge that can be traced through courses and treatises, and
the everyday decisions made by engineers” (424). As a consequence, Picon
argues, the temptation is “to define the engineers through a certain kind of
rational argumentation, either in design or in decision-making” (429).
While this could sound like music to the ears of economists, the histor-
ically contingent notion of rationality and of efficiency in engineering has
sharp contrasts to those in economics that came with the widespread
acceptance of Lionel Robbins’s definition of economics.6 Rationality in

6. Roger Backhouse and Steve Medema (2009) discuss the acceptance of Robbins’s definition.
 Introduction 19

engineering “appears primarily as a guideline for action,” revealing itself

“primarily through the concrete practice of design, technological develop-
ment and decision-making rather than in purely discursive structures”
(Picon 2004: 429).7 Picon then argues that “contrary to a long tradition in
the social sciences, when confronted with science and above all technol-
ogy, rational behavior cannot be separated from the objectives it aims at”
(429–30), to conclude:
This constant interaction means that rationality is not synonymous with
a crystal-clear attitude consisting in the determination of the most appro-
priate means towards an end, whatever it is. In other words, rationality
cannot be reduced to a sort of calculation. Ends and means do not follow
similar paths. They are often somewhat contradictory. Their interaction
is synonymous with perturbations that transforms rationality into some-
thing more muddy, so to say, than what one might expect a priori.
Another reason for this muddy nature lies in the fact that the engi-
neer’s rationality is not a pure individual conduct. It emerges in a con-
text of interaction with other partners. Beside the other engineers, it has
to take into account the existence of entrepreneurs and workers, even if
it tries to set its own agenda. Rather than the result of a solitary exercise
of the mind, rationality is the product of interaction, communication,
and conflict. (430)
Both Picon (2004) and Blockley (this volume) call attention to the fact that
efficiency, or fitness for purpose, means to have a good representation
of what matters in the physical world (given that engineers typically see
themselves as mediators between nature and man). So both efficiency and
rationality are central concerns to engineering and to economics, but they
became understood very differently in those areas. Paying attention to the
actual interactions of engineering and economics requires, therefore, han-
dling historiographical challenges that are not minor.

The Economics-Engineering Nexus Delivered

As its title suggests, the structure of this volume is tripartite. The contribu-
tions focus on the relation between economists and engineers within spe-
cific institutions, or on the way tools traveled from one area to the other, or

7. Picon (2004: 429) highlights that “rationality is not to be confused with logic at large.
Contrary to logic, rationality is permeated by all sorts of historically determined factors like the
representations of nature and man that prevail in a given society.”
20 Pedro Garcia Duarte and Yann Giraud

on how the engineering-economics relation operated in specific national

cultures. Of course, these three aspects are necessarily interrelated, and
several contributions ended up addressing them together.
Our volume, accordingly, starts, in part 1, with three chapters on inter-
actions between economics and engineering knowledge in specific types
of institutions. The set of institutions covered in Amy Bix’s contribution is
the American engineering school in the first half of the twentieth century.
Showing that there is more to economics education intended for future
engineers than Paul Samuelson’s Economics, she analyzes how economic
concerns were present in the engineering profession since the late nine-
teenth century, focusing especially on the attempt by the Society for the
Promotion of Engineering Education to counter the widespread claim that
engineers were deemed responsible for “technological unemployment”
during the Great Depression. It is in that context that engineering educa-
tors developed their own version of economics knowledge and spread it
through textbooks and courses, coming up with the subfield of “engineer-
ing economics.”
While dealing with the same period of time, Thomas Stapleford’s chap-
ter explores economics and engineering knowledge developed not in aca-
deme but in private businesses. Depicting Malcolm Rorty’s work for
American Telephone & Telegraph Company, he argues that some of the
distinct features of telephone engineering created opportunities for the
interaction between economists and engineers, especially when it came to
choosing the optimal amount of investment to respond to the demand.
Trained as an electrical and mechanical engineer, Rorty helped develop
market forecasting techniques and wrote about economics on the occasion
of debates over the public ownership of utilities. Focusing on Rorty is inter-
esting also because he, unbeknownst to most historians of economics, was
one of the founders of the National Bureau of Economic Research with
Wesley Mitchell. And yet, Rorty was only one engineer among a handful
whose work for telephone companies contributed to the development of
operations research and management science during World War II.
The last chapter in part 1, by Béatrice Cherrier and Aurélien Saïdi, is
also the only one in this volume that deals with a particular place, Stan-
ford University. Home of many self-professed “economic engineers” like
Roth, David Kreps, Paul Milgrom, and Robert Wilson, Stanford has a
long history of cross-fertilization between economics and engineering
tools, merging economic modeling with statistics, optimal control, and
game theory. None of those research programs, however, are specific to
 Introduction 21

Stanford. What is specific is how they were combined and infused with an
entrepreneurial spirit later exhibited by Roth and the like. However, it was
never a straightforward story, especially as economics was not considered
an important force at Stanford until relatively recently and was scattered
through many different and at times competing departments and schools
there: the economics department and, most important for our purposes,
the engineering department and the Graduate School of Business.
The second part of the volume deals with tool transfers. Building on
many years of historical work on the military’s influence on the mathe-
matical social sciences, Judy Klein depicts the “shotgun weddings”
between control engineering and applied mathematics that produced tech-
niques eventually used in modern macroeconomics. In some ways, her
narrative starts where Stapleford’s left off, depicting the association
between the engineering of long-distance telecommunication and that of
regulators such as thermostats in the production of servomechanisms to
control weapons during World War II. The new technologies, using nega-
tive feedback loops to enhance a system’s stability, were soon extended to
human areas such as economics. Both critics and defenders of state inter-
vention to stabilize the economy shaped their discourse using concepts
taken from feedback-loop engineering. By the time economists joined,
though, a second shotgun wedding had occurred, one between optimiza-
tion theory and the theory of stochastic processes, which would most
notably nurture rational expectations theory in macroeconomics. This is
where Marcel Boumans’s chapter picks up. His contribution focuses on
the macroeconomist Robert Lucas, who developed his models while at the
Graduate School of Industrial Administration at the Carnegie Institute of
Technology, in the wake of Charles Holt and Herbert Simon’s research
project on business forecasting and decision-making using engineering
methods. Boumans argues that what permitted the rational expectations
“revolution” was a shift from control to information engineering. This is
not a neutral move: while control engineering depicted a world dominated
by human-machine relationships, information engineering described one
populated with information-processing robots.
The third chapter in part 2, by William Thomas, revisits a seemingly
well-known episode in the history of economics, Kenneth Arrow’s 1963
paper on the economics of medical care. While that article, which is consid-
ered a staple of information and uncertainty theory, is generally depicted as
emanating from theoretical concerns over efficiency and rationality, Thomas
connects Arrow’s contribution to his research at RAND on military R&D.
22 Pedro Garcia Duarte and Yann Giraud

There, Arrow developed the view that sequential information gathering

could help reduce uncertainty. That work was qualitative and descriptive,
emphasizing the tentative and approximate nature of decision-making.
This descriptive character also pervaded Arrow’s work on health econom-
ics. Therefore, Thomas argues that Arrow’s place in the history of eco-
nomic theory should not just be seen through the prism of his pushing for
a more formalistic economic theory, as this would undermine the hetero-
geneous character of his methodology.
The fourth and last chapter on tool transfers, by Chung-Tang Cheng,
explored another allegedly engineering-induced economic technique:
microanalytic simulation (microsimulation), invented by Guy Orcutt.
Cheng argues that Orcutt’s approach was influenced by his engineering
and physics backgrounds, and describes it as an alternative to the Cowles
Commission econometric models. Microsimulation used the engineering
of feedback loops, creating a model in which knowledge is derived not
only from the study of aggregate data but from analyzing how compo-
nents in an economic system work with one another and react to external
changes. Used as a technique to simulate welfare policies, it became a tool
to reengineer society.
The final part of our volume offers three chapters placing the engineer-
ing-economics nexus in specific professional practices and/or national con-
texts. Daniel Breslau’s contribution deals with electricity pricing in the
United States, depicting the efforts of a group of researchers—electrical
engineers and economists—led by the control theorist Fred Schweppe to
build an efficient marketplace for wholesale electricity. This followed the
demise of the regulated load-following system, in which it was taken for
granted that the dispatch of power—and therefore prices—should adjust to
the changing demand. Schweppe came up with a new pricing method,
called “locational marginal pricing,” in which at each location prices are
equal to the marginal cost of serving one additional unit of electricity.
While this seems to match neoclassical price theory in a perfectly compet-
itive market, Breslau argues that the Schweppe team reached that conclu-
sion not by thinking in terms of deregulated, free markets but by introduc-
ing price signals and consumer participation into a self-correcting control
scheme. Therefore, he presents a case study of market design where the
designers were not the typical Roth-like economists but actual engineers.
The second contribution in this part, by Guillaume Yon, also deals with
electricity pricing but in a different context: France in the immediate post-
war period. The author presents electricity pricing at the crossroads
between engineering, economics, and French politics. Focusing on Mar-
 Introduction 23

cel Boiteux’s work as a civil servant for Electricité de France, the state
monopoly, from the late 1940s onward, it presents the development of
long-term marginal cost pricing as a calculative technique that did not
emanate from economic theory but from an equipment issue. Like in the
United States at the same period, the pricing of electricity rested on
assumptions about the growth in the load. But in postwar France growth
was politically, not technologically induced, as it was a rule devised by the
Commissariat général au Plan, the French planning agency, that the pro-
duction of electricity should double every ten years. In addition to solving
this equipment issue, long-term marginal cost pricing had two other roles
in the economy: that of providing instructions to the users of electricity so
that they would act according to the plan and that of constituting a social
contract with the population, in which the burden of large-scale invest-
ment would be fairly distributed among citizens.
The final paper of part 3 explores the economics-engineering nexus in
Soviet Russia during the post-Stalin era. Ivan Boldyrev studies the work
of a group of engineers led by the control engineer Mark Aizerman at the
Institute of Control Sciences in Moscow, who ended up developing knowl-
edge in choice theory that, outside Russia, would be considered part of
economics. Moving freely from one area to another is what permitted
Aizerman and his team to be in contact with “bourgeois” economists in
Western countries and develop knowledge that would have been other-
wise considered subversive to the authorities.
Finally, Mary Morgan offers some concluding remarks. Reassessing
her initial thesis that economics has transformed into an engineering sci-
ence during the twentieth century, she now distinguishes between two
engineering modes: the engineering design mode and the tool-based engi-
neering mode of problem solving. Drawing on this distinction, she then
comments on the articles in this volume.

Building a New Metanarrative

or Revisiting Old Ones?
It is not for us to judge whether these contributions, taken together, partici-
pate in the making of a new metanarrative in the history of economics.8 On

8. One of the editors has argued (Giraud 2019) that metanarratives mostly belong to the past
of the history of economics discipline and that the best we can do is to qualify and elaborate on
already existing ones. Nonetheless, Roy Weintraub (2014: 4) revisited the “narrative approaches
to telling the story of how economics changed in the postwar period” to then launch a new one
that is important for understanding the rise of MIT economics.
24 Pedro Garcia Duarte and Yann Giraud

the other hand, it is rather clear that they show that the economists’ own
metanarrative that their discipline has transformed into an engineering sci-
ence in the second half the twentieth century cannot be accepted without a
few qualifications. Indeed, most of the chapters can be read as evidence that
while there were many interactions between economics and engineering
knowledge, these exchanges have not always changed the scope and culture
of each discipline. In substance, economists and engineers still retain their
respective visions of technology and markets. At the risk of oversimplify-
ing, we can say that whereas most engineers consider prices as either
parameters or solutions to a problem essentially driven by technological
characteristics, most economists see prices as conveying epistemic truths
and the markets where they are determined as truth-generating engines.
Likewise, a word like efficiency, while used in both disciplines, will
take a specific meaning in each of them. For engineers, efficiency is
mostly a technical property, whereas for economists it is related to a cer-
tain allocation of resources. Of course, there are many ways in which
economists and engineers can interact and make use of these concepts to
solve practical issues, but it is unlikely they will leave each other with a
better mutual understanding of such issues. The same could be said about
those disciplines’ respective professional attitudes and values. While
economists are interested in solving practical economic and social issues,
their career advancement is still based on scientific merits, as attested by
publications in leading journals, and their sense of accountability regard-
ing the economic and social consequences of the devices they help build
is still limited. In other terms, economists’ contacts with engineering did
not prevent them from going on acting mostly as (applied) scientists.
Whether or not they may offer a new metanarrative, the chapters in this
volume at least not only allow for a reconsideration of some of the main
existing ones concerning the transformation of economics in the twentieth
century but also invite engineering historians to better understand what
Picon (2004: 421) presented as a still open-ended issue: what are the rela-
tions between engineering history and social history, or “what can we
learn through engineering evolution that concerns society and culture at
large?” For the side of economics, while the histories of the field’s mathe-
matization and more generally of its transformation into a more technical
discipline have been mostly considered through the prism of theory (e.g.,
Weintraub 2002), the story of economics’ relation with engineering
reminds us that the technical turn also arose from the treatment of practi-
cal issues—Thomas’s reconstruction of the engineering roots of Arrow’s
 Introduction 25

uncertainty and information theory provides compelling evidence of this,

and so does Yon’s depiction of Boiteux’s long-term marginal cost.
Similarly, looking at the involvement of economics with World War II
and Cold War military funding not from the viewpoint of its association
with “big science” but through the prism of its interacting with engineer-
ing offers a fresher look. Whereas the military-industrial complex story is
most often interpreted from the perspective of economists as an opportu-
nity to assuage their science envy, Klein’s chapter describes how some of
these interactions came through the initiative of the engineers, who iden-
tified similarities between economics and problems in control engineer-
ing they had been used to deal with while participating in the war effort.
Additionally, looking through the economics-engineering nexus helps us
better understand how Samuelson’s famous textbook, Economics, which
developed a streamlined version of Keynesianism in order to make it fit
for future engineers at MIT, should take into account Bix’s study of the
engineer’s side of the story. Finally, looking at the engineering-economics
nexus in certain national traditions helps qualify the simple history of the
internationalization of economic knowledge. Being an engineer or an
economist in France or in the USSR implies a social function that differs
from that of US engineers and economists. While exhibiting a neutral and
universal character, the knowledge that these people produce is most often
embedded in their respective countries’ politics.
Like most HOPE conference and annual volumes, this one does not
seek completion. Instead, our role is to encourage further work. Therefore
we hope that the reader will find herself sufficiently stimulated to want to
expand the research to other topics and periods of time. One aspect that
this volume did not cover and that may be of interest to both historians of
economics and STS scholars is the competing views of engineers and
economists about technology and, even most important, the environment.
More generally, we also hope that this volume will encourage historians
of both economics and engineering to move further away from disci-
plinary history and start considering the extent to which what they per-
ceive as knowledge in their respective fields is in fact jointly produced.

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Introduction: From “Economics as Engineering”
to “Economics and Engineering”

Pedro Garcia Duarte and Yann Giraud

Economists such as Alvin Roth and Esther Duflo have recently argued
that economics in the late twentieth century has evolved from (social) sci-
ence to engineering. On the other hand, historians such as Mary Morgan
and Michel Armatte have argued that the transformation of economics
into an engineering science has been a century-long development. Turn-
ing away from the “economics as engineering” analogy, our introduction
suggests an alternative approach to account for the presumed transforma-
tion of economics into an engineering science. We encourage the develop-
ment of a history of “economics and engineering,” which depicts how these
two types of knowledge—and the communities who produce them—have
interacted in various institutional and national contexts. Drawing on the
contributions to this 2020 annual supplement of HOPE, we show how
these narratives may help change the historiography of twentieth-century
economics.
Keywords  economics, engineering, Alvin Roth, Esther Duflo, N. Gregory Mankiw
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