The Programming Approach and the Demise of Economics Franco Archibugi The Programming Approach and the Demise of Economics Volume I A Revival of Myrdal, Frisch, Tinbergen, Johansen and Leontief Franco Archibugi Rome, Italy ISBN 978-3-319-78056-6 ISBN 978-3-319-78057-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78057-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018945553 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and ­transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface To the Three Volumes of the Trilogy This book, as with many others of my writings from this period, gathers together the dispersed vestiges of a life of research on the methodology of planning, mostly spent at the ‘Planning Studies Centre’ of Rome,1 a non- profit associative research Institute, which was founded in 1963 by a lim- ited but qualified group of colleagues2; and for which I was the director for many years. My thanks go, above all to this very modest research institution—in its turn funded occasionally by the (Italian) National Research Council (CNR)—which and from other interested to ours researches—has allowed me to survive scientifically while going against the predominant conventionalism (and despite the absence of favorable conditions for independent research in Italy). My sincere thanks therefore goes to all those colleagues, members of the staff, collaborators, librarians, donors, researchers, more or less pre- carious or voluntary assistants, who have helped the Centre survive as a non-profit research organization, despite the numerous frustrating difficul- ties; giving me those opportunities that my work as a full professor in several Italian universities, had not given me. However, concerning the contents of this Work, I must bestow an entirely special recognition to a number of economists (the majority of whom sadly are no longer living) for the personal role they had in the development of the ideas of which this work is based. These are economists with whom, many years ago, I had the benefit of direct and personal v vi Franco Archibugi The ‘Programming Approach’ and the Demise… contact and who have had a great influence on me. The most important of them are Gunnar Myrdal, Ragnar Frisch, Jan Tinbergen, Leif Johansen, Wassily Leontief, and mind associated.3 The acknowledgement of the role that they have had in the evolution of my critique to the ‘determinist’ eco- nomics will be testified throughout this Trilogy book by means of many selected quotations of those authors, that enter into various arguments of Programming approach. However, since my intellectual relationship with them was interwoven even from some more important personal contacts, it is fair to also evoke some forms and circumstances of this contact. I will do it—without overloading this Preface—with some brief evocative notes of such relations with each of them, in the Appendix 1 (at the end of Vol. I of this Trilogy). Dedications On a more personal level, I would like to dedicate this Trilogy to a dear, kind, friend of mine, the late Federico Caffè, who was, a very appraised Italian economist, very engaged humanly and socially, and who gained many merits, fortunately widely recognized and very mourned in Italy, even after his painful and anomalous disappearance, devoted to the edu- cation of young Italian economists.4 With him, I had the opportunity to discuss very intensively (since the early days of our friendship, between the ‘forties and sixties’ of the last century, the themes of this book, that he encouraged me to develop in times when they were still at their dawning and imprecise in my own spirit. And overall I feel great regret now for having missed the chance to show him, through this work—and also to discuss again with him— some outlets of ‘scientific’ significance of the political economy, to which many years of common reflection and reading (and related discussions) have brought me. I cannot fail to acknowledge the role played in the formation of the concepts of this book by my assiduous, enduring, absorbing, participa- tion to the ‘economic programming’ (programmazione economica), in Italy, and at international cases, to which I have dedicated a good deal of my professional and academic activities. I think that this experience has Franco Archibugi Preface to the Three Volumes of the Trilogy vii been a permanent and concomitant factor also of the theoretical visions to which I arrived in this work (as in many other of my writings). I believe this experience has been, the ‘conditio sine qua non’ of this book, its indispensable vital lifeline. But that experience has been, within myself, also the material factor of the delay and slow maturation of my theoretical reflexion, since I consumed so much energy and time in that experience (with not very comforting final results, indeed), that I have risked that this book would never materialize (like many other writings belonging to the same theoretical recapitulation and that I do not believe I have the time to conclude before my exit).5 In that experience, indispensable on one hand, but also too absorbing and dispersive from the other, a central, and recursive, role has been played by another personal friend that I esteemed and liked, Giorgio Ruffolo. Together with him, (he engaged in more offices, both political and managerial of that experience as top level public Officer responsible— from 1964 to 1974 in Italy, of the political responsibility, which I shared and covered with him a good deal of the way during this practical experi- ence) without his support I would not have had the opportunity to test, even in a precarious and short-lived manner, the hypothetical construc- tion of that Planning Accounting Framework on the scale of an entire country (Italy). Few (I would say none) of my colleagues from other countries, have had the opportunity to experience, in a concrete political, environment far more equipped and consolidated in men and means, than in mine. However, it may be of some interest, even from a scientific point of view, to explain the factors which have—until the date of this book’s publication—delayed the ‘scientific appointment’ of this book with my dear friend Federico Caffè (aforementioned), that has been at the same time, as said, a kind of scientific appointment with ‘Economics’ itself, (in terms of Economic Policy that was not—it’s best if I say that right away, with clarity, among the most enthusiastic and rich in results, but rather very critical from a ‘scientific’ standpoint.7 The main factor of this delay is that, into the economy of my time, I have preferred to engage myself with concrete (in corpore vili) experiments in planning (through studies of national, territorial, regional and urban viii Franco Archibugi The ‘Programming Approach’ and the Demise… planning)6 by assisting political decision-making processes, and by col- lecting a multitude of ideas and experience, based on these experiments, which are capable of outlining—in positive terms—an adequate ‘theory’ or, better, ‘methodology’ of planning. In fact, my instincts were pushing me to outline this ‘theory’, or rather ‘methodology’ of planning, as based on an integrated and multi-disci- plinary approach, which could definitively go beyond an academic debate on Economics. I thought it’s more urgent and constructive to dedicate myself to the demolition (negatively) of the determinist (or positivist) approaches in Economics, and these—ambiguous visions—of the eco- nomic policy, already performed by numerous colleagues economists of the type called ‘heterodox’ (‘evolutionist’, ‘institutionalist’, ‘realist’, ‘neo-marxist’). In other terms, I was resistant to being caught in the academic debate without having a clear idea of how to substitute the dominant ‘determin- istic’ approach with an alternative system more operational of integrated planning starting from completely different criteria in respect to those predominate in academic life, as far as political-economic actions are concerned. This engagement (in planning theory and methodology) has therefore been my priority ‘scientific’ engagement, especially because it enables me to set a safer pace towards a critique of the classical (or neo-classical) eco- nomic approach, a critique which I have never renounced due to my philosophical background, and which was implicit in my approach to planning itself.7 Another factor in the delay has also been the fact—important in itself—that in the nineteen sixties, I found in economists such as Frisch, Tinbergen, Leontief and Johansen, some answers supporting my position developed previously with my background of historical-philosophical studies, particularly in the traces of ideas and arguments of Gunnar Myrdal’s books.