When asked by Clifford Hildreth who was working on his project, The Cowles Commission in Chicago, 1939-1955, for suggestions and/or observations from economists who had worked at Cowles during that period, Evsey Domar had few vivid recollections to offer of his year there some thirty five years earlier. Two items were associated with Jacob Marschak, one with Lawrence Klein, and one with Kenneth Arrow.
Having written the last Ph.D. dissertation supervised by Evsey Domar, I feel it my obligation to include such nuggets of Domaresque delight as his characterization of the difference between the economist (Kenneth Arrow) and the political scientist (David Easton) whom Domar had introduced to each other: “the political scientist assumed all except what he had explicitly rejected; the economist assumed only what he had explicitly stated.”
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Carbon copy of Domar letter to Hildreth
November 26, 1982
Professor Clifford Hildreth
Department of Economics
University of Minnesota
1035 Business Administration
271 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, NM 55455
Dear Cliff:
This is in reply to your letter of October 27th regarding my impressions of the Cowles Commission.
I really have very little to say, because my connection with the Commission was short (about a year) around 1947-48, and also because I was only nominally a member of the group. I remember four episodes:
- Jacob Marschak asking for another dozen years or so to make economics truly scientific.
- Same, discussing the economics of free (atomic) energy.
- Larry Klein predicting such a low GNP for (I believe) 1947, that after some six months hardly anything was left for the remainder of the year.
- I introduced Ken Arrow and David Easton (the political scientist) to each other. it took them some time to find a mutual language. Reason: the political scientist assumed all except what he had explicitly rejected; the economist assumed only what he had explicitly stated. Perhaps this episode was the most educational of all.
Sorry I cannot help you more.
Cordially,
Evsey D. Domar
/gjk
Source: Economists’ Papers Archive, David M. Rubenstein Library, Duke University. Evsey Domar Papers, Box 4, Folder “Correspondence Hf-Hz”.
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Arrow on David Easton
The exposition of the book [Social Choice and Individual Values] was developed in the next year back in Chicago. I presented the material over a number of seminars. I was grateful to these people [Tjalling Koopmans, Herbert Simon, Franco Modigliani, T.W. Anderson, and Milton Friedman] because they thought it was a good idea, encouraged me and asked good questions; parts of the book are making clear points they found obscure.
Easton was a little different. He was the first political scientist I talked to about this. He gave me the references to the idealist position which was sort of the opposite idea. In a way the idealist position was the only coherent defense that I could see in political philosophy. It wasn’t a very acceptable position, but it was the only one that had at least a coherent view of why there ought to be a social ordering.
Source: J. S. Kelly and Kenneth J. Arrow, An Interview with Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Welfare, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1987), pp. 55-56.
Image Source: Economists’ Papers Archive, David M. Rubenstein Library, Duke University. Evsey Domar Papers, Box 18, Folder “Photographs (Domar)”.