by From Richard Vahrenkamp Since 1945, the United States had experienced a unique innovation push with the computer, the nuclear weapon, new air combat weapons and the transistor within just a few years. These innovations were accompanied by Game Theory and Operations Research in the academic field. Widely–held is the view that computers supplemented the mathematical concepts of Game Theory and Operations Research and gave these fields a fresh impulse. Together, they established the view of the world as a space of numbers and introduced quantitative methods in economics, political science and in sociology. A series of conferences on these subjects settled this new view. They imparted Cold War science and technology policy with a unique flavour of progress, superiority and modernity.
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from Richard Vahrenkamp
Since 1945, the United States had experienced a unique innovation push with the computer, the nuclear weapon, new air combat weapons and the transistor within just a few years. These innovations were accompanied by Game Theory and Operations Research in the academic field. Widely–held is the view that computers supplemented the mathematical concepts of Game Theory and Operations Research and gave these fields a fresh impulse. Together, they established the view of the world as a space of numbers and introduced quantitative methods in economics, political science and in sociology. A series of conferences on these subjects settled this new view. They imparted Cold War science and technology policy with a unique flavour of progress, superiority and modernity.
Whereas the history of quantitative methods has been mainly written as a history of digital computers, the history of Game Theory and Operations Research has had only a small number of contributions. In the issue 83 of Real World Economics Review Bernard Guerrien and Lars Pålsson Syll published 2018 critical contributions to the current state of Game Theory: Syll criticised the rational choice theory and Guerrien doubts whether Game Theory could be applied to real world problems.[1] My approach here is a history of science approach that reveals the artificial content of Game Theory and Operations Research in the Cold War science context. In addition as a sociology of science approach, I characterize these theories as an expert movement of mathematicians. This paper deconstructs the current success stories and shows that Game Theory and Operations Research were not only related to the Cold War scenario in the nominal sense, but lacked substantiated applications in social, political and economic fields, and remained a branch of applied mathematics.