2011. “The fellowship of econometrics. Selection and diverging views in the province of mathematical economics from the 1930s to the 1950s”, History of Political Economy (forthcoming

The inception and development of econometrics is one of the most impres-sive success stories in twentieth-century economics. This essay discusses the founding of the Econometric Society, the defining moment of the story, in order to bring to light the debates over the role of mathematics in the new “social physics, ” as Ragnar Frisch called it. Using previously unpub-lished archival evidence from the founders of econometrics,1 we conclude that the methodological disputes over the role and scope of mathematics reflected diverging views. Some of these debates are well known, namely, those between John Maynard Keynes and Jan Tinbergen and his companions (1938 to 1940) and between Tjalling Koopmans and the institutionalist school (the 194