The World Economy as Scientific Object, 1930-1939

The mathematical model of the U.S. business cycle that Jan Tinbergen and other economists employed by the League of Nations developed from 1936 to 1938 was arguably the first scientific representation of a national economy. This paper examines the relationship between this seminal model and diplomatic and ideological disputes that pervaded daily life for researchers at the League. Tinbergen’s methodology was a formal analogue of internationalism, the League’s predominant political philosophy. Internationalists assumed that the true character of phenomena was independent of specific national or cultural contexts, and that science could therefore be a force for unity and peace. Likewise, Tinbergen mathematically distinguished societal, cultural, or other so-called “structural” factors that might vary with time and place from the fluctuations of an abstract, idealized business cycle. Describing and predicting these fluctuations, he argued, was the purpose of the new science of econometrics. His methods satisfied the requirements of the League’s permanent staff, who sought to avoid the constant strategic conflicts among diplomats in Geneva by presenting scientific knowledge as disassociated from any one national point of view. Tinbergen’s work was an early example of how, later in the 20th century, certain claims about the character of economic life would enable economists employed by governmental agencies to present their advice as neutral and technical. The idea of the economy as an object of scientific investigation, predictable and universally accessible to researchers and observers regardless of their political allegiances, originated in part as a response to the intrigues of the League.