Social engineers changing the world: Tinbergen and Frisch’s framing of economics

Abstract

In this impressive biography of Jan Tinbergen, Erwin Dekker (2021) describes this pioneer of modern economics as being both “the most important economic ‘bureaucrat’ of the twentieth century” and “one of the greatest idealists the economic profession has ever known” (xvi, xvii). As paradoxical as this may seem, it is a very accurate summary of Tinbergen’s life. As we move through the more than 400 pages of the biography, this tension between the pragmatic public intellectual and the rigorous academic emerges as defining the career and the heritage of the Dutch physicist who became an economist for the sake of social justice. Indeed, the synthesis of his life’s contribution was his “institutional awareness”— or the placing of “science at the service of the state”—where he developed and experienced a new approach to the “theory and technique of governance” (11, 13). He was a proud social engineer, what the younger and impressed colleague, Paul Samuelson, would call a “humanist saint” (418).