1. "why were biological analogies in economics 'a bad thing'? edith penrose’s battles against social darwinism and mccarthyism"
(science in context, forthcoming)
In 1952, Edith Penrose wrote the most articulated criticism of biological analogies in economics. This was a time when the intellectual atmosphere in the United States was in full swing: the beginning of the Cold War had profound impact on what could or could not be legitimately be said on campuses. Based on historical archives on Penrose and McCarthyism retrieved from the FBI, I explore the intricate relations between Penrose's scientific, personal and political values.
2."one analogy can hide another: physics and biology in alchian's economic natural selection"
(history of political economy, 2009)Today, Armen Alchian’s « Uncertainty, evolution and economic theory » (1950) is hailed by evolutionary economists as the single piece which resumed an evolutionary brand of theorizing in economics, after the eclipse of the interwar period. On the opposite side, Alchian’s article is also cherished by standard economists who consider it to be a powerful defense of the maximization principle in the theory of the firm. This paper the early intellectual life of Alchian and his later activities in the RAND Corporation to provide some context to his treatment of uncertainty, central to his article. Our study shows that it was his involvement in military systems analysis at the onset of the Cold War that led Alchian to reckon that uncertainty was a fundamental obstacle to marginal analysis. We argue that Alchian’s economic natural selection is a statistical argument addressing the problem of uncertainty and which, if phrased in biological parlance, owes its logic to statistical mechanics. Arguably, this reconsideration could inform the current debate on what is a properly evolutionary perspective in economics.
3. "economics and biology in post-war united states"
(phd diss., 2008 [in french, zip file])