ABSTRACT
Why should 80-year-old lecture notes in economics by Ragnar Frisch have any interest today? We shall try to answer the question in this introduction and also prepare the reader for what he/she will find in them. The lecture series for which these notes were prepared was given by Ragnar Frisch as Visiting Professor at Yale University in the autumn of 1930. The timing deserves particular attention – the eve of the foundation of the Econometric Society. Frisch’s lecture series lasted well into December 1930. The Econometric Society was founded on 29 December 1930 in the Statler Hotel, Cleveland, Ohio, in between other events at the annual joint meetings of the American Economic Association, the American Statistical Association, and other professional associations. The Econometric Society was founded as a programmatic association, with the primary goal to scientify economics. Physics was set as the scientific ideal, as referred to in the Constitution. The Econometric Society was the first international organization in economics. At the time, it was of less importance in the United States than in Europe, where scholars from different countries were brought together at the annual Econometric Society meetings and speeded up the exchange of methodological and theoretical ideas considerably. The membership remained small until long after the Second World War. But many young budding talents were attracted to the Society almost from the beginning, as reflected in Nobel economics laureates over the first 20 years of the Prize, many of whom had acquired the membership in the 1930s or 1940s. The success of the Society is perhaps far beyond what its founders had expected. A key to this success was the financial support of Alfred Cowles III, which allowed the Society to publish its own journal, Econometrica, from 1933.1 In the very first issue Joseph Schumpeter wrote programmatically on behalf of the Econometric Society:
We do not impose any credo – scientific or otherwise – and we have no common credo beyond holding: first, that economics is a science, and, secondly that this science has one very important quantitative aspect. We are no sect. Nor are we a ‘school’.
