Koopmans in the Soviet Union A travel report of the summer of 1965 Till Düppe1 December 2013 Abstract: Travelling is one of the oldest forms of knowledge production combining both discovery and contemplation. Tjalling C. Koopmans, research director of the Cowles Foundation of Research in Economics, the leading U.S. center for mathematical economics, was the first U.S. economist after World War II who, in the summer of 1965, travelled to the Soviet Union for an official visit of the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Koopmans left with the hope to learn from the experiences of Soviet economists in applying linear programming to economic planning. Would his own theories, as discovered independently by Leonid V. Kantorovich, help increasing allocative efficiency in a socialist economy? Koopmans even might have envisioned a research community across the iron curtain. Yet he came home with the discovery that learning about Soviet mathematical economists might be more interesting than learning from them. On top of that, he found the Soviet scene trapped in the same deplorable situation he knew all too well from home: that mathematicians are the better economists. Key-Words: mathematical economics, linear programming, Soviet economic planning, Cold War, Central Economics and Mathematics Institute, Tjalling C. Koopmans, Leonid V. Kantorovich. Word-Count: 11.000 1 Assistant Professor, Department of economics, Université du Québec à Montréal, Pavillon des Sciences de la gestion, 315, Rue Sainte-Catherine Est, Montréal (Québec), H2X 3X2, Canada, e-mail: [email protected]. A former version has been presented at the conference “Social and human sciences on both sides of the ‘iron curtain’”, October 17-19, 2013, in Moscow. I thank Ivan Bolyrev, Olessia Kirtchik, and Wade Hands for comments received at this meeting. I also profited from helpful comments by Roger Backhouse, Johanna Bockman, and Martin Weitzman. Koopmans in the Soviet Union A travel report of the summer of 1965 “Marco Polo imagined answering that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home, and a little square of Venice where he gamboled as a child.” (Calvino, Invisible Cities) Travelling is one of the earliest forms of knowledge production that exists in almost all cultures: Those who know are those went away, found out, and came back with something to tell. Travelling combines two aspects of knowledge: discovery, that is the encounter with the foreign and the novel, which is the kind of experience that we associate with modern knowledge. But it is also contemplation and self-reflection, that is, the encounter with oneself and the familiar, which is a rather low-ranked experience in the modern industry of knowledge. These two aspects describe also Tjalling C. Koopmans’s voyage, jointly with his wife Truus Koopmans, to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1965. Koopmans was the research director of what was the hotbed of mathematical economics in the U.S., the Cowles Foundation of Research in Economics hosted at Yale University. Cowles stands for a profound transformation of the intellectual culture of economics during the decades following World War II away from a policy 1 oriented discipline towards a modeling science (Düppe and Weintraub 2014a). His trip led him to the Central Economic-Mathematical Institute (CEMI, also TSEMI) of the Academy of Science of the USSR, founded two years before in 1963. CEMI would become the hotbed of research in mathematical economics in the USSR that launched a profound transformation of the orthodox- Marxist oriented discipline of political economy to what become labeled “economic cybernetics”. Like an ambassador of these two transformations, Koopmans travel carried the hope of a merging intellectual culture in East and West beyond the ideologies surrounding economic science here and there. The trip was part of the Inter-Academic Exchange Program between the two Academies of Science that was run under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies (Byrnes 1969). The program existed since 1958 and was a result of the post-Stalinist liberalization of science. Yet it was still the Soviet Academy that informed the U.S. Academy about the fields of research for which they wished and allowed an exchange. Until 1965, they did not call for an economist to come over. Koopmans indeed was the first official U.S. economist visiting the post- War Soviet Union.2 In what follows, I reconstruct Koopmans’s travel on the base of his official report to the American Council of Learned Societies as well as his correspondence with Soviet and U.S. scholars relevant to this trip.3 As there is little recent historical work about the post-Stalinist rise of mathematical economics in the Soviet Union, this account introduces the reader, through 2 Some other economists have visited the Soviet Union before such as Abram Bergson who travelled already during the Stalinist around 1940 and also Raymond Powell in 1957. But these were not official Academy of Science exchange visits. 3 “Report of the visit to the USSR, May 9 as exchange scholar in economics under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies”, Tjalling Charles Koopmans Papers (TKP), Carton 22, “Trip to the Soviet Union, Information Sheets, 1963-1969” (cited in the following as Report). 2 Koopmans’s eyes, to the main actors and institutions of this emerging community.4 Whom did he meet? What did they talk about? And, relevant not only for the historical records of priority and influence, what difference did his visit make to the development of mathematical economics in both East and West? Adapting Koopmans’s first person perspective might come at the cost of a selective portrayal of the Soviet scene, but allows asking a more pricy question: With what hopes and expectations did Koopmans leave, what surprises did he encounter, what questions remained open, and, having gone through these experiences, what did he learn about himself and the U.S. community of mathematical economists? Thus, reconstructing Koopmans’s trip to the Soviet Union adds a piece to the puzzle in the history of scientific experience in 20th century economic science. Out of New Haven The fact that Koopmans was the first economist invited to the Soviet Union is little surprising. The Soviet sensitivities regarding the profession of economists were without doubt greater than regarding other sciences that were practiced on more equal terms on both sites of the iron curtain. Koopmans, as a child of the socialist calculation debate, believed strongly in the idea of equal terms of capitalism and socialism. His entire scientific ethos drew from this attitude that economic science should be practiced prior to the specification of institutional terms, and only as such can contribute to the scientific design of economic institutions in whatever system. 4 For other more recent accounts see Sutela 1991, 2008, Gerovitch 2002, Bockman and Bernstein 2008, Bockman 2011, Bockman 2011, Boldyrev and Kirtchik 2012. The older literature of the 1970s (e.g. Zauberman 1975, Ellman 1973, Kassel 1971, and also Katsenelinboigen 1980, 1986) often lacks the historical distance to see the intellectual change in context. 3 “From my explorations of Marxist thinking in my student years, I have retained a lifelong interest in the prior formulation of that fundamental part of economic theory that does not require specifying the institutional form of society to be used as a framework for the description and comparison of different economic systems.” (Koopmans 1974 [1992]: 235) This basic belief in the pre-institutional content (not only form) of economic theory was at stake when traveling to the Soviet Union. To some extent, this belief was shared among his U.S. colleagues. Being a mathematical economist during the early Cold War was not a self-evident intellectual practice and impinged by contradictory demands. Many U.S. scientists responded defensively to the ideological pressures on the Cold War academic milieu, exerted by phenomena such as McCarthyism, anti-Semitism, and military secrecy (Düppe 2013). The rhetoric of de- politicized research appealed to many scholars, specifically those who applied methods that stem from the military context that was easily confused with non-democratic uses of science. Also Koopmans, a physicist trained economist, contributed to military war planning as a statistician for the British Merchant Shipping Mission in Washington by analyzing efficiency problems of the transportation of tanks (1939, 1942). It was in this research that he formulated the principles of what he would after the war call the “activity analysis” (Koopmans 1951, Düppe and Weintraub 2014a). But Koopmans basic belief also differed from that of other scholars. When Koopmans spoke of pre-institutional theory, he did not only want to establish formal neutrality as many others, but also an actual equivalence of economic problems across political systems. If economic theory is institutionally neutral, then it should play the same role in a free market economy and a socialist economy. Koopmans was thus the ideal candidate for approaching Soviet economists on eye- level. Eastern and Western economists, more than merely sharing universal but inconsequential 4 reason, could learn something from one another. Koopmans operated simultaneously in what for others were two separate spheres: universal reason and institutional design. He left New Haven with the hope of creating a trans-political community of mathematical economists that each in their own country could help one another optimizing their system. Koopmans had good reasons for his hope. In the early 1960s, the same basic belief in pre- institutional, scientific foundations of economic policies became fashionable also in the Soviet Union.