Laws and Models at the League of Nations: Econometrics in Geneva, 1930–1939

Abstract

Economists began using models between the First and Second World Wars. The first econometric model of the United States was produced by Jan Tinbergen at the League of Nations. Modeling was a methodological solution to the political problems of the interwar period. International norms of cooperation and governance had to be reconciled with new demands for national autonomy in economic affairs, with a new understanding of the nation-state's capacity to make and remake the economy. Models possessed a composite, ambiguous character that appealed to both nationalist and internationalist sympathies. Models combined fact and theory, the particular and the general, the local and the global. The practice of modeling contrasted with and largely displaced an older, universalizing discourse of scientific law, predominant in the nineteenth century. Modeling reflected the nation-state's ascendance as a legitimate arbiter of economic policy, situated uneasily within a regime of international norms and institutions.