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Economists, Historians of Science, and the Making of the Bowman Report, View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Birmingham Research Portal A Road Not Taken: economists, historians of science and the making of the Bowman report Backhouse, Roger; Maas, Harro DOI: 10.1086/691421 License: None: All rights reserved Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Citation for published version (Harvard): Backhouse, R & Maas, H 2017, 'A Road Not Taken: economists, historians of science and the making of the Bowman report', Isis, vol. 108, no. 1, pp. 82-106. https://doi.org/10.1086/691421 Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal Publisher Rights Statement: Checked for eligibility: 27/03/2017. Roger E. Backhouse and Harro Maas, "A Road Not Taken: Economists, Historians of Science, and the Making of the Bowman Report," Isis 108, no. 1 (March 2017): 82-106. DOI: 10.1086/691421 http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/691421 © 2017 by The History of Science Society. General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. The express permission of the copyright holder must be obtained for any use of this material other than for purposes permitted by law. •Users may freely distribute the URL that is used to identify this publication. •Users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the University of Birmingham research portal for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research. •User may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of ‘fair dealing’ under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (?) •Users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain. Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive. If you believe that this is the case for this document, please contact [email protected] providing details and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate. Download date: 01. Feb. 2019 A Road Not Taken: Economists, Historians of Science, and the Making of the Bowman Report Roger E. Backhouse, University of Birmingham and Erasmus University Rotterdam Harro Maas, University of Lausanne Abstract: This essay investigates a hitherto-unexamined collaboration between two of the founders of modern history of science, Henry Guerlac and I. Bernard Cohen, and two economists, Paul Samuelson and Rupert Maclaurin. The arena in which these two disciplines came together was the Bowman Committee, one of the committees that prepared material for Vannevar Bush’s Science—The Endless Frontier. The essay shows how their collaboration helped to shape the committee’s recommendations, in which different models of science confronted each other. It then shows how, despite this success, the basis for long-term col- laboration of economists and historians of science disappeared, because the re- sulting linear model of science and technology separated the study of scientific and economic progress into noncommunicating boxes . n 20 September 1944 Rupert Maclaurin, Professor of Economics at MIT, wrote to Henry OGuerlac, the official historian of the Radiation Laboratory, about his future. I would like, therefore, to explore with you the possibilities of your ultimately joining our group here. I am under the impression that you were planning to go back to Wiscon- sin to finish out your term there, anyway, but my interest is of longer range than that. I believe that if you wanted to switch your field to history of modern science and engineer- Harro Maas is Professor at the Centre Walras-Pareto for the History of Economic and Political Sciences at the University of Lau- sanne. He has published widely in the history of economics, especially on Victorian political economy. His current interest is in economics as a public science and the intrusion of economic tools in the private sphere. Among his recent publications are Ob- serving the Economy, edited with Mary S. Morgan (Duke, 2012), Economic Methodology: A Historical Introduction (Routledge, 2014), and The Making of Experimental Economics: Witness Seminar on the Emergence of a Field, edited with Andrej Svorencˇík (Springer, 2016). CWP-IEPHI, UNIL, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland; [email protected]. Roger E. Backhouse is Professor of the History and Philosophy of Economics at Birmingham University and Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is writing an intellectual biography of the economist Paul Samuelson, the first volume of which is scheduled to appear in 2017. Other current projects include editing volumes on the recent turn to applied economics and on liberal econo- mists and the welfare state. With Philippe Fontaine he has edited The History of the Social Sciences since 1945 (Cambridge, 2010) and A Historiography of the Modern Social Sciences (Cambridge, 2014). Department of Economics, University of Birming- ham, Birmingham, B15 2TT, United Kingdom; [email protected]. Acknowledgments. We are grateful to Michael Dennis and Béatrice Cherrier for invaluable assistance. Neither is implicated in the conclusions we have drawn. We would also like to thank Yann Giraud, Michael Gordin, Verena Halsmayer, Tiago Mata, Jessica Wang, participants in seminars at Duke University, the London School of Economics, and Harvard University, three anonymous referees, and the Editor of this journal for helpful comments on earlier versions. Isis, volume 108, number 1. © 2017 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved. 0021-1753/2017/0108-0005$10.00. 82 This content downloaded from 131.211.208.019 on March 18, 2017 05:38:06 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Isis—Volume 108, Number 1, March 2017 83 ing there might be a very interesting career opportunity at M.I.T. In any event, wherever you are after the War, I would like to see now if we couldn’t work out some kind of coop- erative plan for developing the field. I would like to see a setup which would attract some really able graduate students into the field and would include a live program of research in which the skills and background of the economist and the historian of science would be combined in some way or would at least benefit by cross fertilization of ideas.1 This long-term collaboration never happened: economics and the history of science developed largely independently after the war, with significant implications for the study of the linkages between science, technology, and economic change. Guerlac returned to Cornell, where he was instrumental in establishing its history of science program, while the economists at MIT developed approaches to innovation and economic growth that were not informed by history of science. Before their separation, however, a brief window of collaboration between economists and historians opened up when Maclaurin, Paul Samuelson, Guerlac, and I. Bernard Cohen came together in the first four months of 1945 to work on the Bowman Report. On 21 November 1944, President Roosevelt asked Office of Scientific Research and Devel- opment (OSRD) director Vannevar Bush to prepare a report on what the American government could do to support science after the war in order to ensure the long-term safety and prosperity of the American people.2 One element of Bush’s response was to invite the Johns Hopkins geographer Isaiah Bowman, a veteran of such work, to chair a committee that would prepare a report on the third of four questions posed in Roosevelt’s letter: “What can the government do now and in the future to aid research activities by public and private organizations?”3 Maclau- rin was invited to act as the committee’s secretary. Samuelson was named assistant secretary, and Guerlac was appointed to head up the secretariat, which included Cohen as one of its members, that would undertake research and prepare materials for the committee.4 Despite the extensive literature on the Bush Report, the operation of the Bowman Com- mittee, the arena in which our protagonists came together and in which different conceptions of science confronted each other, has not been analyzed. Historians have examined the role of this report in the political processes leading to the establishment of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the authorship of Roosevelt’s letter to Bush, and whether or not it affirmed the linear model of the relationship between science and economic growth.5 This literature on 1 Rupert Maclaurin to Henry Guerlac, 20 Sept. 1944, Henry Guerlac Papers, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., Box 25, Folder 9 (such references hereafter take the form HGP 25/9). 2 Vannevar Bush, Science—The Endless Frontier: A Report to the President (1945; Washington, D.C.: National Science Founda- tion, 1960). 3 Roosevelt added the rider, “The proper roles of public and private research, and their interrelation, should be carefully consid- ered”: quoted ibid., p. 73. Bowman had taken the initiative for the short-lived National Science Advisory Board, headed by MIT president Karl Compton. It had reported on the same question that was now under consideration. See Carroll W. Pursell, Jr., “The Anatomy of a Failure: The Science Advisory Board, 1933–1935,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1965, 109:342–351. 4 The secretariat also included the chemist John Edsall and Robert Morison, a biologist and Rockefeller Foundation officer. Remarkably, Samuelson’s later account mentioned only Edsall, Morison, and himself as writing the report.
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