Between “Magnificent Machine” and “Elusive Device”

Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief crafted a computer metaphor to describe the workings of an economy through his development of interindustry input-output analysis. He came to argue that economic activities of a national economy behaved as if they were equations arranged, stored, and manipulated in computers. The computer metaphor, however, has two limitations. First, economists’ careful crafting of codelike economic activities was a more heuristic process than it appeared. Second, economists often deemed the economic structure of developing economies too irregular, and that of less developed economies too simple, for the analysis to work. Leontief’s computer metaphor showcases the quest for automating information processing, computing, and human decision making in Cold War science and technology, leaving many legacies in the contemporary algorithmic culture.