A History of the Histories of Econometrics

Marcel Boumans and Ariane Dupont-Kieffer

The understanding procedure. Another sort of question that the scientist has to

answer is: why did it happen? Why did this situation exist? Why did the events

follow the course they did? The answer to these questions constitutes the

rational part of the investigation. By the power of his mind the scientist tries to

bring some reasonable order into the happenings and the things he observed.

(Frisch 2011, 31)

Introduction: 1985

Wikipedia (read August 10, 2010) gives the following science-and-technology-related

events which happened in 1985:

- February 19: The first artificial heart patient leaves a hospital;

- February 20: Minolta releases world's first autofocus single-lens reflex camera;

- March 4: The Food and Drug Administration approves a blood test for AIDS, used

since then to screen all blood donations in the United States;

- July 24: Commodore launches the Amiga personal computer;

- November 20: Microsoft Corporation releases the first version of Windows; and

- Franco Modigliani receives the Nobel prize for “for his pioneering analyses of

saving and of financial markets”.

However unique and special these events are, they do not necessarily make 1985 a

special year.

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1748758

subject of this paper:

- August 19: At the Fifth World Congress of the Econometric Society, for the first

time, an Invited Symposium on Econometric Methodology was held. The invited

speakers were David F. Hendry, Edward Leamer and Christopher Sims. Adrian R.

Pagan (1987) was discussant and Angus Deaton was chairing this session.

- December 17-18: Two-day symposium to mark Joop Klant’s retirement from the

Chair of History and Philosophy of Economic, University of Amsterdam. The papers

presented (de Marchi 1988) were ‘An appraisal of Popperian methodology’ by Daniel

M. Hausman, ‘The natural order’ by Klant, ‘Ad hocness in economics and the

Popperian tradition’ by D. Wade Hands, ‘Popper and the LSE economists’ by Neil de

Marchi, ‘The case for falsification’ by Terence W. Hutchison, ‘John Hicks and the

methodology of economics’ by Mark Blaug, ‘Finding a satisfactory empirical model’

by Mary S. Morgan, ‘The neo-Walrasian program is empirically progressive’ by E.

Roy Weinraub, ‘The case for pluralism’ by Bruce J. Caldwell, ‘Thick and thin

methodologies in the history of economic thought’ by Donald N. McCloskey, and

‘Economics as discourse’ by Arjo Klamer.

- December 29: At the Ninety-Eight Annual Meeting of the American Economic

Association, a Joint Session with the History of Economic Society was held on ‘First

Forays Into the History of Economics’1. The papers presented at this session were:

‘Cowles’ problems revisited’ by Roy J. Epstein, ‘Statistics without probability and

Haavelmo’s revolution’ by Morgan (1987) and ‘The development of the British

1
This is how it was announced (AEA 1985, 907). According to Morgan this is probably a misprint, it
should be ‘Econometrics’ instead of ‘Economics’.

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1748758

David Levy was presiding this session.

- December 30: At the same AEA Meeting, another Joint Session with the HES was

held on ‘Popper and the LSE Economists’. The papers presented at this session were:

‘Popper and the LSE’ by de Marchi (1988a), ‘Ad hocness in economics’ by Hands

(1988), ‘Popper misapprehended’ by Hausman and ‘Testing and the information

content of theory’ by Dale Stahl. Caldwell, Alexander Rosenberg, Chris Archibald,

Lawrence A. Boland were discussants and Weintraub was presiding this session.

Three other relevant events of 1985 were the publications of Weintraub’s book

General Equilibrium Analysis and Michael McAleer, Pagan and Paul A. Volker’s

article ‘What will take the con out of econometrics?’3, and the foundation of

Econometric Theory by Peter C.B. Phillips.

Phillips was not only the founder of Econometric Theory but also its editor since its

first issue published in 1985 till today. The first issue contains an extensive Editorial

explaining the editorial policy objectives of this journal. It is remarkable that to four

obvious objectives, he added two historical aims:

5. To publish historical studies on the evolution of econometric thought and on

the subject's early scholars. In its present stage of evolution, the subject of

econometrics is still visibly rooted in the historical tradition that slowly took

shape in the early years of this century, which gained definite form in the work

of Frisch and Tinbergen in the 1930s and crystallized in the studies of

Haavelmo and the research of the Cowles Commission during the 1940s, the

latter very largely under the inspiration of Marschak and Koopmans. Many of

2
This is also the title of his D.Phil. (Oxon) Thesis defended in 1988.
3
This was a response to Leamer (1983).

3
 us have much to learn from this historical tradition and from the talents,

concerns, and achievements of these forerunners of present day econometrics.

Happily, this field of research in the history of thought is now under

development. In support of this field, ET wishes to encourage the publication

of articles that explore the nature of this historical tradition, examine the

evolution of econometric thought from its foundation research, and study the

subject’s early scholars. […]

6. To publish high-level professional interviews with leading econometricians.

[…] These in-depth interviews will offer the opportunity of a wide ranging

personal commentary on major schools of thought and reveal individual

insights into the evolution and the present state of econometric research.

Through these interviews the econometrics community will be able to learn

more about the human side of research discovery and come to understand the

genesis of the subject’s main ideas from some of its finest minds. Most

particularly, those readers who have not had the benefit of personal contact

with some of our leading econometricians may now have the opportunity to

hear their voices, not only on matters concerned with their own research, but

also on their intellectual background and influences and on their methods of

teaching and research. It is hoped that these interviews will awaken an

intellectual excitement in new and prospective generations of econometricians

and will encourage them to make the fullest use of their own talents. (Phillips

1985, 4)

These are many facts to show that in 1985 there was close mutual interaction of

history of economics, philosophy of science and econometrics. This interaction

4
continued till today: In 2006 a new Palgrave series Handbook of Econometrics was

inaugurated with a volume on Econometric Theory (Mills and Patterson 2006).

Strikingly, this volume starts with a (historical) overview (by Aris Spanos) of

different approaches “that should encourage though, discussion, and perhaps some

controversy”, a chapter (by Kevin Hoover) on methodology “generally absent from

textbooks” and two on the history of econometrics (by Richard W. Farebrother and

Gilbert and Qin).

As a matter of fact this volume on the history of econometrics before us also

originated due to a close interaction with econometricians. The North American

Summer Meeting of the Econometric Society at Duke University in June 2007 had –

for the first time – a session on the history of econometrics, organised by Weintraub.

The session was a success: “The history session was well attended and the discussion

was lively. Although the audience was almost entirely practitioners rather than

historians” (Hoover 2010, 20). An outcome of this discussion was that the editors of

HOPE and the session participants started to consider whether it would be useful and

feasible to have a conference on its own on the history of econometrics.

To investigate its feasibility, Boumans started to survey the literature on contributions

on the history of econometrics to see who the earlier contributors were and whether

they were still active to find out whether a critical mass of historians would be

interested “to turn up the heat and bring the history of econometrics back to the

forefront of the field” (Hoover 2010, 19). Surveying the literature it soon became

clear that the interest in the history of econometrics arose from within econometrics

itself, and that its histories are mainly written by econometricians. Only a few papers

5
on econometrics were written by historians of economics. According to Weintraub

(1985) this was a “scandal”:

it is obvious that historians of economic thought must be comfortable with

modern work in economics. That is, the history of economic thought should

not exclude an interest in the tools of mathematics, econometrics, and “modern

high theory.” It is a minor scandal that there is no comprehensive history of

either the rise of econometrics or the mathematization of economics.

(Weintraub 1985, 10)

But he only rectified this scandal partly; his own study was on the history of

mathematical economics only.4

Twenty-five years after this scandal, the situation has not really improved. Although

since Weintraub’s call in 1985 occasionally a history of econometrics appears in the

Journal of the History of Economic Thought and in HOPE, the number of articles

remains very small in proportion to the general interest of historians in economics.

So, on the one hand, one can be pleased that the histories of econometrics are at least

written by the econometricians themselves, but on the other hand, this leads therefore

to all kinds of unintended but nevertheless unavoidable historiographic biases. As will

be discussed below, one reason for econometricians to be interested in history is that

history can be used to delineate econometrics, that is, to set its disciplinary boundaries,

with respect to its aim, its methods, its scientific values, etc. The risk is that history is

4
He mentions, however, “some work in England by Mary Morgan, sponsored by the Social Science
Research Council and guided by Professor David Hendry” (140).

6
used to legitimize set boundaries, while actually these boundaries should be

historicized. Another problem with history as a means to delineate is that most

histories are written from the perspective of econometrics as a separate science, and

so they are constructed separate from the histories of connected disciplines like

mathematics, economics, statistics, computer science, physics, engineering,

biometrics, psychometrics, genetics, accountancy, actuarial sciences, etc. Moreover,

delineating history has also a blind spot for applied research where disciplinary

boundaries are usually blurred, but also a blind spot for what is happening outside the

geographic areas of appointed founding fathers. Most histories give the impression

that econometrics is a European-North-American science ignoring developments in

the rest of the world. The conference aim was to rectify these historiographic biases

by inviting contributions to these issues; the subsequent chapters are a result of this

invitation.

Chart Session

Another goal of the conference was to gain some understanding of the historical

background of these histories on econometrics, to get at a history of the histories of

econometrics so to say. Questions like where this interest of econometricians in the

history of econometrics came from, why historians of economics might be interested

in econometrics or not, were questions we wished to have addressed at the conference.

A way to deal with these questions was to take the advantage that the HOPE

conferences would be held at Duke University where several of the 1985 characters

had and have their (temporary) home office. The original idea was to have a ‘witness

seminar’ with the 1980s witnesses. A witness seminar is a seminar “where several

people associated with a particular set of circumstances or events are invited to meet

7
together to discuss, debate, and even disagree about their reminiscences” (Tansey

1997). Because a witness seminar’s dynamics depends on its focus on a “particular set

of circumstances or events”, we started to doubt whether we actually could have such

a seminar. The main question was to investigate what happened in the 1980s with

respect to this “boiling” interest in the history of econometrics. A decade is not an

event, so it would be hard to know what to focus on. Nevertheless we decided to have

a collective-memory stimulating session with the Duke people (currently called the

HOPE Group) and the conference participants, and not to call it a ‘witness seminar’

but a ‘chart session’ instead:5 Morgan and Boumans had prepared several charts to

stimulate the participant’s memories.6 These ‘charts’ showed diagrams and graphs of

‘relationship among disciplines’, ‘types of histories’, ‘number of publications’,

‘kinships’, ‘PhD’s and trainings’, ‘institutions/journals’, and ‘geography’.

The surprising result of this session7 was that after a warming-up stage participants

started to call several events that appeared to be important catalysers for several works

on the history of econometrics. This is the reason why we started above with listing

the 1985 events. It seems that for this kind of oral history, whether you would want to

call it a witness seminar or not, events are essential.

Two events of the 1980s episode turned out to be crucial: The very early (8:00am)

Sunday morning session on ‘First forays into the history of econom[etr]ics’ was very

5
The whole session was video-recorded and is available [Paul: ?].
6
Because of the ash clouds spit out by the Iceland volcano Eyjafjallajökull, Morgan and Dupont-
Kieffer were not able to attend physically, they participated via the internet.
7
For writing this introduction we benefitted a lot of the reminiscences shared by the participants (in
order of sitting): Hoover, Jim Wible, Weintraub, Eric Chancellier, Aiko Ikeo, Robert Dimand, Gilbert,
Hsiang-Ke Chao, Charles Renfro, Allin Cottrell, Qin, Daniela Parisi, John Aldrich, Jeff Biddle, Tom
Stapleford, Bernardo Coelho, Sofia Terlica, Alain Marciano, de Marchi, Paul Dudenhefer, and (online)
Morgan and Dupont-Kieffer. This chapter is a reflection of this session.

8
well attended and brought de Marchi and Gilbert to the idea of having the papers of

this session published in the Oxford Economic Papers (1989), of which Gilbert had

been general editor from 1979 to 1988. As elected vice president of the History of

Economics Society, de Marchi had the responsibility to concoct three sessions for the

AEA meetings. Coats (1987, 62) mentioned this session explicitly: “Incidentally, the

new interest in the history of econometrics—exemplified by the excellent History of

Economics Society session organized by Neil de Marchi at the December, 1985 AEA

meeting – is one of the most exciting current developments in the subject, for it

promises not only to enhance our knowledge and understanding but also to widen the

professional audience and support for the history of economics.” The other event was

the 1989 Capri conference (see below) where several of the characters involved in this

history publicly took distance from a Lakatosian historiography. The consequences of

this step will be discussed below.

Is Econometrics Science?

The reason for the convergence of econometrics, history of economics and philosophy

of science in the 1980s is the accusation in the 1970s of the econometrics’ inability to

meet the high expectations of the 1950s as producer of reliable predictions and policy

advises. Particularly, Hendry, in his LSE inaugural lecture ‘Econometrics – Alchemy

or Science?’, used the opportunity to revisit the famous Keynes-Tinbergen debate as a

backdrop to re-iterate the scientific possibilities of econometrics. This lecture was

published in 1980, the same year in which Sims’ ‘Macroeconomics and Reality’ was

published in Econometrica, the article in which his VAR approach was introduced.

9
What started as a critique of John Maynard Keynes (1939) on Jan Tinbergen’s first

League of Nations volume (1939) soon became a more general debate about the role

of econometrics and what it might be able to achieve. Tinbergen was commissioned in

the late 1930s by the League of Nations to perform statistical tests on business-cycle

theories. The results of this study were published in a two-volume work, Statistical

Testing of Business-Cycle Theories (1939). The first volume contained an explanation

of this new method of econometric testing as well as a demonstration of what could be

achieved, based on three case studies. Keynes’s (1939) critique was that the technique

of multiple correlation analysis which had been adopted by Tinbergen was solely a

method for measurement. It contributed nothing in terms of either discovery or testing.

The implication was that if the economic theorist does not provide the modeler with a

complete set of causal factors, then the measurement of the other causal factors will

be biased. Moreover, Keynes argued that some significant factors in any economy are

not capable of measurement, or may be interdependent. Another of Keynes’s concerns

was the assumed linearity of the relations between these factors. He also noted that the

determination of time-lags and trends was too often based on trial and error, and too

little informed by theory. And last but not least was the problem of invariance: would

the relations found also hold for the future? These questions remained central to the

subsequent debate.

Taking into account all of these concerns and Tinbergen’s responses to them, Keynes

came to the conclusion that econometrics was not yet a scientific approach:

No one could be more frank, more painstaking, more free from subjective bias

or parti pris than Professor Tinbergen. There is no one, therefore, so far as

10
 human qualities go, whom it would be safer to trust with black magic. That

there is anyone I would trust with it at the present stage or that this brand of

statistical alchemy is ripe to become a branch of science, I am not yet

persuaded. But Newton, Boyle and Locke all played with Alchemy. So let him

continue. (Keynes 1940, 156)

Hendry labelled Keynes’s list of concerns as “problems of the linear regression

model”, which, according to him consisted of: using an incomplete set of determining

factors (omitted variables bias), building models with unobservable variables (such as

expectations), estimated from badly measured data based on index numbers, obtaining

spurious correlations from the use of proxy variables and simultaneity, being unable

to separate the distinct effects of multicollinear variables, assuming linear functional

forms not knowing the appropriate dimensions of the regressors, mis-specifying the

dynamic reactions and lag lengths, incorrectly pre-filtering the data, invalidly

inferring causes from correlations, predicting inaccurately (non-constant parameters),

confusing statistical with economic significance of results and failing to relate

economic theory to econometrics. To Keynes’s list of problems, he added: stochastic

mis-specification, incorrect exogeneity assumptions, inadequate sample sizes,

aggregation, lack of structural identification and an inability to refer back uniquely

from observed empirical results to any given initial theory.

Hendry admitted that “It is difficult to provide a convincing case for the defence

against Keynes’s accusation almost 40 years ago that econometrics is statistical

alchemy since many of his criticisms remain apposite” (Hendry 1980, 402). The ease

with which spurious correlations can be produced by a mechanical application of the

11
econometric method suggests alchemy, but according to Hendry, the scientific status

of econometrics can be regained by showing that such deceptions are testable.

There are two issues that are of particular interest here. Firstly, Hendry in the need of

saying something about what science is, referred to and used mainly Popperian

literature: Chalmers 1976, Popper 1968, 1969 and Lakatos 1974, but also mentions

Kuhn (1962). Secondly, research for this paper was financed in part by a grant

(HR6727) from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) to the Study in the

History of Econometric Thought at the LSE. This grant was also used to finance

Morgan’s PhD research on the history of econometrics which she, in 1979, had just

started at the LSE, supervised by Hendry.8 In an ET interview, Hendry explained how

he became interested in the history of econometrics:

Harry Johnson and Roy Allen sold me their old copies of Econometrica, which

went back to the first volume in 1933. Reading early papers such as Haavelmo

(1944) showed that textbooks focused on a small subset of the interesting

ideas and ignored the evolution of our discipline. Dick Stone agreed, and he

helped me to obtain funding from the ESRC9. By coincidence, Mary Morgan

had lost her job at the Bank of England when Margaret Thatcher abolished

exchange controls in 1979, so Mary and I commenced work together.

(Ericsson 2004, 779)

Soon afterwards, Qin started to study the more recent history of econometrics through

to about the mid-1970s, which led to her PhD thesis in 1989, supervised by Hendry,
8
She finished her PhD in 1984. Her 1990 book originated from this thesis.
9
In 1983, the Social Science Research Council had changed into Economic and Social Research
Council.

12
Gilbert and Stephen Nickell.10 This interest in the history of econometrics also led to

a series of seminars at Nuffield to discuss history with John Aldrich, Gilbert, Morgan

and Qin (Ericsson 2004, 780).

Hendry referred to Keynes’s usage of the term alchemy to discuss the scientific nature

of econometrics. Another way of denoting this discussion is to see how much

econometrics differs from “economic tricks” (or “econo-mystics” or “icon-ometrics”,

see Hendry 1980, 388). This characterization is based on a story by Carl F. Christ

(1967, 155):

I once had an urgent letter to dictate and, the Economics Department secretary

being unavailable, I prevailed upon the secretary of the neighbouring Political

Science Department to help. When I proof-read the typed copy,

“econometrics” had been transformed to “economic tricks”.

This story was probably the motivation for Leamer (1983) to contribute to the debate

about the scientific character of econometrics under the title: “Let’s take the con out

of econometrics”.11

Leamer’s paper is very much about the “myth” of science that empirical research is

(randomized controlled) experimentation and scientific inference is objective and free

of personal prejudice. Though Leamer is ultimately proposing a Bayesian approach,

he is using Lakatosian and Kuhnian notions to advocate such an approach. The

10
Morgan and Aldrich were her thesis examiners. Her 1993 book originated from this thesis.
11
“Con” must have the meaning of “a swindle in which you cheat at gambling or persuade a person to
buy worthless property”, like con in “con man”: “a man who cheats or tricks someone by means of a
confidence trick”. So to take the con out of something is taking the tricks away. We thank Morgan for
her to understand this phrase. McAleer, Pagan and Volker (1985) has a similar interpretation.

13
problem of nonexperimental settings (usual the case in economics) compared to

experimental settings (“routinely done” in science) is that “the misspecification

uncertainty in many experimental settings may be so small that it is well

approximated by zero. This can very rarely be said in nonexperimental settings”

(Leamer 1983, 33). Traditional econometrics seems not to admit this “experimental

bias”, and as such misspecification uncertainty functions as “Lakatos’s ‘protective

belt’ which protects certain hard core propositions from falsification” (34). So,

projecting the image that econometrics is like agricultural experimentation

(randomized controlled experimentation) is not only “grossly misleading” (31), but

also leads, in Lakatosian terminology, to protecting a degenerating programme, which

means pseudo-science like alchemy.

But also “the false idol of objectivity has done great damage to economic science”

(36). If we want to make progress, according to Leamer, “the first step we must take is

to discard the counterproductive goal of objective inference” (37). Inference is a

logical conclusion based on facts, but because “the sampling distribution and the prior

distribution are actually opinions and not facts, a statistical inference is and must

forever remain an opinion” (37). Moreover, Leamer considers a fact as “merely an

opinion held by all, or at least held by a set of people you regard to be a close

approximation to all” (37). In a footnote he refers to Kuhn (1962) and Michael

Polanyi’s (1964) Personal Knowledge as a philosophical backing up for this notion of

fact as “truth by consensus”.

The problem of using opinions, however, is their “whimsical nature”. An inference is

not “believable” if it is fragile, if it can be reversed by minor change in assumptions.

14
It is thus the task of the econometrician to withhold belief until an inference is shown

“to be adequately insensitive to the choice of assumptions” (43).

To prevent econometrics from becoming alchemy, Hendry, Leamer and Sims

developed their own methodologies: the general-to-specific approach, the Bayesian

approach and the VAR approach, respectively, leading to the debates of the mid 1980s.

Beside the already mentioned symposium at the Fifth World Congress of the

Econometric Society, according to Dale J. Poirier (Hendry, Leamer and Poirier 1990),

these debates took place at sessions of the North American Summer Meeting in June

1986 at Duke University, and the Australasia Meeting in August 1988 at the

Australian National University. The 1986 North-American meeting had Hendry’s

Walras-Bowley Lecture with a subsequent Panel Discussion with Robert F. Engle,

Daniel McFadden, John W. Pratt, Eugine Savin and Sims as panelists and John

Geweke as moderator. The 1988 Australasian meeting had a symposium on economic

methodology with Dennis S. Aigner, Clive W.J. Granger, Leamer and M. Hashem

Pesaran as contributors. Disappointed “in the value-added of public panel

discussions” (172), Poirier (Hendry, Leamer and Poirier 1990) organized a “dialogue”

in ET between Hendry, Leamer and himself.

This Methodenstreit fits nicely in a longer tradition of debates about the most

appropriate empirical scientific method: the already earlier mention Keynes-

Tinbergen debate and the measurement-without-theory debate between Tjalling

Koopmans (Cowles Commission approach) and RutledgeVining (NBER approach).

These well-known debates are all strikingly related to econometric methodology. The

15
advantage of debates is that they are often less technical and so receive more attention

from outside their field.

Delineation of Econometrics

This worry about developing an econometric methodology that can help to prevent

economics to become a pseudo-science, the underlying motivation of the 1980s

debate, is not so different from the motivation of the founding fathers of econometrics

to design a program for turning economics into a science.12 The beginnings and its

subsequent development of econometrics are closely related to attempts of finding the

most appropriate scientific empirical methodology for economics. According to

Ragnar Frisch, who first coined the term econometrics in his very first paper in

economics ‘Sur un problème d’économique pure’ (1926), the term means the

unification of economic theory, statistics, and mathematics:

Intermediate between mathematics, statistics, and economics, we find a new

discipline which, for the lack of a better name, may be called econometrics.

Econometrics has as its aim to subject abstract laws of theoretical political or

“pure” economics to experimental and numerical verification, and thus to turn

pure economics, as far as possible, into a science in the strict sense of the word.

(Frisch 1971)

In his first Editorial of the newly established journal Econometrica, Frisch (1933)

gave an explanation of the term econometrics:

12
See Bjerkholt and Qin (2011a) for a more detailed history of the founding of the Econometric
Society with the aim of “scientization” of economics.

16
 Its definition is implied in the statement of the scope of the Society, in Section

I of the Constitution, which reads: “The Econometric Society is an

international society for the advancement of economic theory in its relation to

statistics and mathematics. The Society shall operate as a completely

disinterested, scientific organization without political, social, financial, or

nationalistic bias. Its main object shall be to promote studies that aim at a

unification of the theoretical-quantitative and the empirical-quantitative

approach to economic problems and that are penetrated by constructive and

rigorous thinking similar to what has come to dominate in the natural

sciences.” (Frisch 1933, 1)

It is apparent that the underlying motivation for this “new discipline”, from its

beginning, was to turn economics “into a science”, that is to penetrate economics by

“constructive and rigorous thinking” dominant in the natural sciences.

Presumably, this is the reason Frisch and Tinbergen were awarded the first Nobel

Prize in economics. As is well known, the Nobel Prize in economics is not a real

Nobel prize but the Central Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Science in Memory of

Alfred Nobel instituted at the tercentenary celebration of the Swedish Central Bank.

The Central Bank approached the Nobel Foundation and the Royal Swedish Academy

of Science (the awarding authority for the prizes in physics and chemistry) for

agreement on the conditions and rules for the prize. “There was, however, a certain

scepticism towards the new prize idea among some natural scientists in the Academy

– partly because of a general reluctance to extend Nobel prizes to new fields, partly

because of doubts whether a social science, such as economic, would be ‘scientific’

17
enough to warrant a prize of this kind on an equal footing with prizes in ‘hard

sciences’ like physic and chemistry” (Lindbeck 1985, 37-38). Because of this

skepticism it is interesting to see that the first prize was awarded to two founders of

econometrics: “Their aim has been to lend economic theory mathematical stringency,

and to render it in a form that permits empirical quantification and a statistical testing

of hypotheses. One essential object has been to get away from the vague, more

‘literary’ type of economics” (Lundberg 1992, 3).

Econometrics was originally defined in accordance with its scientification program.

This was, however, not the only way econometrics was originally delineated. While

designing its program, Frisch together with Charles Frederick Roos and Irving Fisher

were also drawing a list of potential charter members for the Econometric Society in

formation. The list consisted of 28 names from 11 countries (Divisia 1953, Bjerkholt

and Qin 2011a).13

Another way of delineating a discipline is to appoint forerunners. With respect to this

kind of delineation, it is remarkable that from its first issue in 1933 onwards (till the

1960s however) Econometrica regularly published articles on denominated

forerunners:14 Emile Borel, Augustin Cournot*, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth*,

Francesco Fuoco, William Stanley Jevons*, Hans von Mangoldt, Johann Heinrich

Von Thünen*, Vilfredo Pareto*, Léon Walras, Knut Wicksell*.

13
Luigi Amoroso, L. v. Bortkiewicz, A.L. Bowley, T.N. Carver, Gustav Cassel, J.B. Clark, J.M. Clark,
C. Colson, F. Divisia, G.C. Evans, Mordecai Ezekiel, Corrado Gini, J.M. Keynes, Hans Mayer, H.L.
Moore, Jacques Moret, Bertil Ohlin, Warren M. Persons, A.C. Pigou, Umberto Ricci, Jacques Rueff, H.
Schultz, J. Schumpeter, E. Slutsky, T. de Pietri Tonelli, Gustavo del Vecchio, Harald Westergaard and
W. Zadadski.
14
The names with an asterisk have also their photograph printed in Econometrica. In issue 2.4 (1934)
there is also a “specimen” printed of Walras’ correspondence.

18
Gerhard Tintner (1953) used this strategy of appointing forerunners as one of the

means to “define” econometrics. These were Gregory King, William Petty’s Political

Arithmetik, Edgeworth, Pareto, and Henry L. Moore’s Synthetic Economics. He

concluded the essay that the preferred definition of econometrics (still) is “a

combination of economics, mathematics and statistics” (31).

From 1939 onwards, articles on “founding fathers” were published whenever the

occasion arose (anniversary or decease): Oskar Anderson, Bernard Chait, Clément

Colson*, Georges Darmois, François Divisia, Luigi Einaudi, I. Fisher, Eraldo Fossati,

Frisch*, Yehuda Grunfeld, Leif Johansen, Keynes, Oskar Ryszard Lange, Ta-Chung

Liu, Moore*, Hans Peter, Roos, Henry Schultz*, Joseph A. Schumpeter*, Eugen

Slutsky*, Abraham Wald*, Frederik Zeuthen.

This tradition of bringing the history of econometrics to the econometrician’s

attention and awareness died more or less out in the 1960s. Note, for example, that

Econometrica didn’t pay any attention to the fact that its first editor Frisch and

Tinbergen received the very first Nobel Prize in economics in 1969. As we saw earlier,

it was Econometric Theory, established in 1985, that continued this tradition.

This delineation of econometrics by listing forerunners and founding fathers is a

continuation of a longer tradition of producing bibliographies of “mathematico-

economic writings”. Jevons (1878) produced a “bibliography of works on the

mathematical theory of political economy” which was published in the Journal of the

Statistical Society of London, for two reasons: firstly, “with the purpose of

discovering such forgotten works and memoirs” and secondly, “in the hope that

19
suggestions may be thereby elicited for its extension and correction” (398).15 The list

contained 71 publications. Walras (1878) extended Jevons’ list to 98 writings. He

published this list with a translation of Jevons’ call for extensions and corrections in

the Journal des Économistes. The lists were sent around for further “completion”

(Jevons 1957, xx). This resulted in a “list of mathematico-economic books, memoires,

and other published writings” in the second edition of his Theory of Political

Economy [1879]. This list contained 146 publications. In the preface to this edition, he

explained how the selection was done: it should contain

an explicit recognition of the mathematical character of economics, or the

advantage to be attained by its symbolic treatment. I contend that all economic

writers must be mathematical so far as they are scientific at all, because they

treat of economic quantities, and the relations of such quantities, and all

quantities and relations of quantities come within the scope of the mathematics.

(Jevons 1957, xxi)

According to Jevons, the list could be decomposed into four distinct classes. A first

class of publications are of those “who have not at all attempted mathematical

treatment in an express or systematic manner, but who have only incidentally

acknowledged its value by introducing symbolic or graphical statements” (xxiv). The

second class contains those “who have abundantly employed mathematical apparatus”,

but, misunderstood “its true use, or being otherwise diverted from a true theory” (xxv).

The third class contains those “who, without the parade of mathematical language or

method, have nevertheless carefully attempted to reach precision in their treatment of

20
quantitative ideas” (xxv). The most important class, however, is the fourth class of

those “who have consciously and avowedly attempted to frame a mathematical theory

of the subject, and have […] succeeded in reaching a true view of the Science”

(xxviii). These are: Jules Dupuit, Cournot and Walras. But a “truly remarkable

discovery in the history of this branch of literature” (xxxii) was Hermann Heinrich

Gossen.16

This tradition was subsequently continued by I. Fisher. In his doctor’s thesis

published in the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences in

1892, Fisher had appended a ‘bibliography of mathematico-economic writings’.

Fisher had selected out of Jevons’ 1888 list “those 50 which are either undoubtedly

mathematical or are closely associated logically or historically with the mathematical

method” (Fisher 1892, 120). To this list a second list was added with 66 publications

up to 1892. This bibliography was “superseded” by a ‘bibliography of mathematical

economics’ up to 1897, containing 327 publications appended to the translated 1897

edition of Cournot’s Researches into the Mathematical Principles of the Theory of

Wealth.

This tradition was also continued in Econometrica by the editorial aim of organizing

surveys of “the significant developments within the main fields that are of interest to

the econometrician” (Frisch 1933, 3). The idea was to have four surveys each year,

one of each on the following fields: 1) general theory, 2) business cycle theory, 3)

statistical technique and 4) statistical information. Surveys were written by Johan

Åkerman, Frisch, J.R. Hicks, Nicholas Kaldor, Gabriel A. D. Preinreich and

16
In the third edition (1888), a list of books was added by Jevons’s wife Harriet Ann Jevons. This list
contained 196 writings.

21
Tinbergen on field (1); Alvin H. Hansen and Herbert Tout, and Tinbergen on (2); Paul

Lorenz, Horst Mendershausen, Paul R. Rider, Roos and W. A. Shewhart on (3); and C.

Bresciani-Turroni, Jakob Marschak, Roos and Hans Staehle on (4). These surveys did

not only inform the reader of Econometrica about “significant developments”, but

also to promote new theories, tools or methodologies. This tradition came to an end

after six years.

Besides the already mentioned histories, bibliographies and surveys there are several

contributions on the history of the Econometric Society by Divisia (1953) and Christ

(1983) and on the Cowles Commission by Christ (1952, 1977, 1985 and 1994),

Clifford Hildreth (1986) and Epstein (1987).17

The boiling points of interest in the history of econometrics were initiated by attempts

to delineate the discipline, that is, to define its boundaries, and to identify the proper

scientific approach. What we see is that this delineation is closely related to the

images of science adhered in each period of interest. For Jevons and Fisher a scientific

theory should be mathematical. Frisch’s image of science, and of his contemporaries,

can be identified as the scientific worldview of (Logical) Positivism. The science

images playing a role in the methodological debates of the 1980s were those of Karl

Popper, Imre Lakatos and Thomas Kuhn. These science images in each period played

an important role in the delineation of econometrics and therefore cannot be detached

from the written histories in each of these periods.

17
Phillips was the supervisor of Epstein’s (1984) Ph.D. Thesis “Econometric Methodology in
Historical Perspective”. “I started to develop serious questions about the general scientific status of
empirical econometrics. […] I felt it was important to explore the problem more deeply in the context
of the studies and methodological arguments developed by the researchers who were most influential in
shaping econometrics as we know today. To my surprise, I discovered a long history of substantive
debates over methodology that complements, and even extends, the critiques put forth recently by some
of the most respected modern practitioners” (Epstein 1987, v).

22
Weintraub’s (“long struggle of escape” to find the most appropriate)

historiography

It seems that thinking about a historiography equipped for econometrics we have to

take account of the econometricians’ ideals of science. Philosophy of science is a

discipline that studies these ideals. So, it seems obvious that a historiography focused

on econometrics should be connected to philosophy of science. Despite the

obviousness of this connection, it has not been investigated as much for econometrics,

as it has been done for mathematical economics: In his various publications of the

history of mathematical economics, Weintraub has written extensively about a

historiography for mathematical economics in relation to philosophy of science.

Weintraub’s (1985) history of general equilibrium analysis sympathized with the

developments in econometrics to look for “historical evidence pertaining to the

development of the work they evaluate” (140). For that reason he quoted Lakatos’s

paraphrase of Kant: “Philosophy of science without the history of science is empty;

history of science without philosophy is blind” (Lakatos 1971, 91). Influenced by the

philosophical views of that time, that is, of Kuhn and Lakatos, methodology should be

historically informed, as also de Marchi and Gilbert (1989, 9) emphasized in their

introduction to the special issue of the Oxford Economic Papers on the history and

methodology of econometrics:

In fact methodology is inquiry into why the accepted is judged acceptable. But

standards alter; and while methodology can be suggestive, its suggestions are

offered only on the basis of an understanding of past and current practice and

23
 the reasons for it. Methodology thus shades imperceptibility into historical

inquiry, and indeed cannot do otherwise. To be self-aware, however,

practitioners must look to methodology of this historically informed sort.

But their philosophical framework itself was fixed, namely the developments were

characterized as taking place within “Research Programmes in the strict (Lakatosian)

sense” (5). The same applies to Weintraub’s (1985) historical study of General

Equilibrium Analysis, where he “argues that previous methodological investigations

have been distorted by the use of inappropriate models taken from the philosophy of

science that were developed to appraise work in physical sciences” (i), but

nevertheless he took for granted that Lakatos’s model of research programmes was

appropriate for the study of mathematical economy.

However, the methodology used for reconstructing a development had, according to

Lakatos, to be normative. He was quite explicit about this. Taking its cue from the

above paraphrase of Kant’s dictum, Lakatos’s (1971) paper on the history of science

intended to explain:

how the historiography of science should learn from the philosophy of science

and vice versa. It will be argued that (a) philosophy of science provides

normative methodologies in terms of which the historian reconstructs ‘internal

history’ and thereby provides a rational explanation of the growth of objective

knowledge; (b) two competing methodologies can be evaluated with the help

of (normatively interpreted) history; (c) any rational reconstruction of history

24
 needs to be supplemented by an empirical (socio-psychological) ‘external

history’. (Lakatos 1971, 91)

As a result “each internal history has its characteristic victorious paradigms” (93).

For Weintraub this was – a few years later – the main reason no longer to tell “the

story of twentieth century economics as the rise and fall, or the progress or

degeneration, of various scientific research programs in economics” (Weintraub 2002,

262). History should be done from “a perspective based not on asking of how science

should be done, but rather how it was and is done” (267). This is the so-called

naturalistic turn: to understand science, whether historically, philosophically,

sociologically or economically, one should look at its practice as it is actually done.

Weintraub was not the only one among historians and philosophers of economics who

came to this conclusion. A marking event was a conference, organized by de Marchi

and Blaug, in 1989 on the island of Capri. The conference intended to investigate

whether Lakatos’s methodology of scientific research programmes “had shown itself

to be an appropriate framework for analysing what economics is and is not like” (de

Marchi 1991, 1). This neutral phrased question turned out to be the geyser of a heated

debate at the conference, reflected by the organization of the contents of the

conference volume (de Marchi and Blaug 1991). The conference organizers and

editors of the proceedings decided not to write a joint introduction but instead de

Marchi wrote the introduction and Blaug an ‘Afterword’. Where de Marchi (1991)

observed that the “tone” of many Capri papers contrasted “sharply” with the mood of

25
an earlier Lakatos conference held in 1974: “not a few participants displayed more

awareness of difficulties […] or impatience” (18), Blaug (1991) sensed hostility:

No one could possibly have predicted how the mixture of people collected at

Capri would react to our instructions but I was personally taken aback by what

can only be described as a generally dismissive, if not hostile, reaction to

Lakatos’s MSRP. Of the 37 participants, I estimate that only 12 were willing

to give Lakatos a further run for his money and of the 17 papers delivered at

the conference not more than five were unambiguously positive about the

value of MSRP. (Blaug 1991, 500)

One of the principal consequences of this conference was an increased interest among

historians and philosophers of economics in the subject of scientific practices in

economics as an alternative to a rule-based prescriptive approach – the naturalistic

turn.

But, as Weintraub rightly admits: there can be “no escape from ‘frameworks.’ There

is no view from nowhere, no platforms on which I, the historian, can stand apart and

aloof from the materials on which I work” (Weintraub 2002, 269). For his history of

economics as a mathematical science, Weintraub (2002) employs a framework

developed by the historian of mathematics Leo Corry. Corry (1989) makes a

distinction between what he calls the “body of knowledge” and the “image of

knowledge”.

26
 We may distinguish, broadly speaking, two sorts of questions concerning

every scientific discipline. The first sort are questions about the subject matter

of the discipline. The second sort are questions about the discipline qua

discipline, or second-order questions. It is the aim of a discipline to answer the

questions of the first sort, but usually not to answer questions of the second

sort. These second-order questions concern the methodology, philosophy,

history, or sociology of the discipline and are usually addressed by ancillary

disciplines. (Corry 1989, 411).

The body of knowledge includes all those contents related to the subject matter of the

given discipline, these are its theories, facts, methods and open problems. The images

of knowledge include all claims about knowledge itself; they serve as guiding

principles; they pose and resolve questions that arise from the body of knowledge, but

are not part of and cannot be settled within the body of knowledge itself. These

second-order questions, for example, are: Which of the open problems of the

discipline most urgently demands attention? How should we decide between

competing theories? What is to be considered a relevant experiment? What procedures,

individuals, or institutions have authority to adjudicate disagreements within the

discipline? What is to be taken as a legitimate methodology?

This division between the body and image of knowledge is not sharp and is

historically determined. The answers to the second-order questions depend on the

contents of the body of knowledge at a given stage of development of the discipline.

Moreover, changes in the body of knowledge may alter these answers. But these

answers are not exclusively determined by the body of knowledge; they may be

27
influenced by other, external factors as well. In turn, the image of knowledge plays a

decisive role in directing research and further determining the development of the

body of knowledge. They constantly interact dynamically.

Corry’s motivation for this distinction is that the study of the interaction between

these two “layers”

might provide a coherent explanation of the effect of sociohistorical factors on

the realm of pure ideas, while avoiding dubious “strong” explanations that

overemphasize the effects of these factors. Such explanations, which attribute

the content of theories to factors absolutely external to them, lead unavoidably

(and sometimes intentionally) to relativism. (Corry 1989, 412)

Of relevance to understand the history of econometrics is Corry’s discussion of how

mathematics is different from the other exact sciences: “mathematics is the only exact

science in which statements about the discipline may still be inside the discipline”

(413), which he called the “reflexive character of mathematics”. This distinguishing

character of mathematics led to a more precise differentiation between reflexive

knowledge and images of knowledge in mathematics. Reflexive knowledge is “all

thinking about mathematics that is carried out strictly inside mathematics” (414), e.g.

proof theory. Images of knowledge are “all claims about mathematics that at a given

historical point are not an integral part of the mathematical body of knowledge” (414),

it includes “comprehensive research programs such as Klein’s Erlangen program of

Hilbert’s list of problems of 1900” (414), it also includes the philosophy and history

of mathematics.

28
Using Corry’s categories to characterize the role of history in econometrics, it seems

that history of econometrics is used as reflexive econometric knowledge, but in

contrast to mathematics, its is thinking about econometrics that is not an integral part

of the econometric body of knowledge but takes place where the body of knowledge

and the images of knowledge interact dynamically. Corry states that second-order

questions, which concern methodology and history, are “usually addressed by

ancillary disciplines” (411), except mathematics due to its reflexive character, but

what we saw is that econometricians also address these questions, and that it has been

hardly taken over by “ancillary” disciplines.

History of Econometrics as Reflexive Knowledge

As a result of “a renewed interest in econometric methodology” and “the articulation

of many distinctive viewpoints about empirical modelling and the credibility of

econometric evidence” (Hendry 1986, xi) in the 1980s, econometricians like Hendry

and Spanos felt the need to bridge the gap between the textbook econometric theory

techniques “in all their formal glory” and the ad hoc procedures empirical researchers

had to resort to: “Econometrics textbooks encouraged the ‘myth’ that the main

ingredients for constructing good empirical econometric models were a ‘good’

theoretical model and a menu of estimators (OLS, GLS, 2SLS, LIML, IV, 3SLS,

FIML)” (Spanos 1986, xv).

To set up a new methodology, the first section of the first chapter of Spanos’s (1986)

textbook ‘Statistical Foundations of Econometric Modelling’ (with a foreword by

Hendry), starts with a “brief historical overview” to delineate its intended scope. Its

29
starting point is a “working definition” of econometrics: “Econometrics is concerned

with the systematic study of economic phenomena using observed data” (Spanos 1986,

3).

As a matter of course, a new definition of econometrics leads to a significant revision

of the list of forerunners. According to Spanos’s history they are: Thomas Bayes,

Daniel Bernoulli, Carl Charlier, Pafnuty Chebyshev, Clark, Charles Davenant,

Abraham De Moivre, Edgeworth, Ronald Aylmer Fisher, Francis Galton, Johann Carl

Friedrich Gauss, John Graunt, William Sealey Gosset, Edmond Halley, Reginald

Hawthorn Hooker, King, Andrei Nikolaevich Kolmogorov, Joseph-Louis Lagrange,

Pierre-Simon Laplace, Adrien-Marie Legendre, Robert A. Lehfeldt, Alexandre

Mikhaïlovitch Liapounov, Malthus, Andrei Andreevich Markov, Wesley Clair

Mitchell, Moore, Karl Pearson, Petty, Adolphe Quetelet, Schultz, Slutsky, Alfred

Russel Wallace, Herman O.A. Wold, Elmer J. Working, Philip G. Wright, George

Udny Yule. Only four persons survived the earlier Econometrica lists: Edgeworth,

Moore, Petty and Slutsky. Looking at this list, one can only but conclude that

“Econometrics began as an offshoot of the classical discipline of Mathematical

Statistics because the data found in economics had unusual properties” (Granger 2006,

xi).

Spanos used for this brief history, beside the earlier works by historians of statistics

and probability theories: Cramer (1972), Maistrov (1974), Seal (1967), Stigler (1954),

and Stigler (1962), and by the philosopher of science Hacking (1975), also the then

30
more recent histories of econometrics: Hendry and Morgan (1995)18, Morgan (1982),

Morgan (1984). A new methodology needs new histories.

While Spanos and Tintner still rooted econometrics partly in Political Arithmetik of

Petty, Hendry and Morgan (1995, 4) cut that root of: “Econometrics emerged, not

from the long-lost seventeenth-century tradition of Political Arithmetik, but from the

nineteenth-century explosion of statistical social science and more particularly from

the biometrics tradition which flowered at the end of that century”. The readings they

provided included only articles of six persons appearing on the Econometrica lists: I.

Fisher, Frisch, Jevons, Moore, Schultz, and Wald.

Twenty years after the publication of his textbook, Spanos (2006) choose Moore as

“the quintessential pioneer” of early twentieth century econometrics”:

His empirical studies were instrumental in generating discussions on how the

newly developed statistical tools of Galton, Karl Pearson and Yule could be

utilized to render economics an empirical science. This early period is

important, because some of the crucial weaknesses of the current textbook

approach can be traced back to Moore (1911, 1914). (Spanos 2006, 16)

While Moore put econometrics on the wrong track, it was R.A. Fisher was who

contributed the most important ideas to the development of econometrics. Note that

R.A. Fisher did not appear on all former lists, except in Spanos’ own 1986 history.

18
This “Readings in Econometric Thought”, as it was then titled, was expected to be published in 1986.

31
Conclusions

Corry’s distinction between the body and image of a science can so provide an

understanding of the history of econometrics and its own continuing struggle with its

boundaries. The changes and developments of the econometrician’s image of science,

that is, inclusive their perception of the views of the philosophers of science at a

relevant period, can help to clarify the development of econometrics. In other words,

understanding the development of econometrics as a modern science also asks for

understanding of the development of the image of science, which includes the history

of philosophy of science and the history of economic methodology. Beside that

philosophers of science need to be historically informed, historians of science need to

be philosophical informed, which mean more precisely here that they need to be

informed about the developments of the philosophical ideas about science. To

paraphrase Lakatos: “Philosophy of science without the history of science is empty;

history of science without the history of philosophy is blind”.

Corry’s distinction between the body and image of knowledge does not only provide a

framework to write histories of econometrics, but also to write a history of these

histories. From its beginnings, econometricians have considered historical knowledge

as reflexive knowledge useful to delineate their discipline. As such the histories

written in each period reflect the image of their discipline in that period. We saw that

in the 1930s, when mathematics was still considered to be an essential component of

econometrics, many histories referred to the “mathematico-economic” roots, by

surveying this literature but also by denominating mathematical economists as

forerunners. Cournot, Pareto and Walras do not appear in any current history of

econometrics. Each period has its own list of forerunners and founding fathers.

32
In the post-war period till the 1980s, history of econometrics was the history of

Cowles Commission econometrics. This only changed when in the 1970s the limits of

the Cowles program became visible and “young turks” like Hendry, Leamer and Sims

started to develop alternative programs. These new programs initiated histories of

areas “before” and “beside” the Cowles program. Econometrics today is much more

considered as statistics applied to economic data, which is reflected by the increased

attention for histories of statistics in relation to the history of econometrics and with a

more prominent role of R.A. Fisher. We leave it to future historians to delineate the

kind of econometrics that is reflected by this volume, we are simply too close to it to

see it.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the participants of the HOPE conference for their

contributions and comments, see footnote 8 for their names. We also would like to

thank Duo Qin for her many valuable comments and Marcel would like to thank Mary

Morgan in particular for the numerous amounts of conversations. We also would like

to thank Alain Pirotte and the external referees Spencer Banzhaf, Steven Durlauf,

Marc Nerlove, for their excellent reports.

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