Ivan Boldyrev’s research while affiliated with Radboud University and other places

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Publications (35)


Soviet Mathematics and Economic Theory in the Past Century: A Historical Reappraisal
  • Article

December 2024

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21 Reads

Ivan Boldyrev

What are the effects of authoritarian regimes on scholarly research in economics? And how might economic theory survive ideological pressures? This article addresses these questions by focusing on the mathematization of economics over the past century and drawing on the history of Soviet science. Mathematics in the USSR remained internationally competitive and generated many ideas that were taken up and played important roles in economic theory. These same ideas, however, were disregarded or adopted only in piecemeal fashion by Soviet economists, despite the efforts of influential scholars to change the economic research agenda. The article draws this contrast into sharper focus by exploring the work of Soviet mathematicians in optimization, game theory, and probability theory that was used in Western economics. While the intellectual exchange across the Iron Curtain did help advance the formal modeling apparatus, economics could only thrive in an intellectually open environment absent under Soviet rule. (JEL B23, B24, B30, C02)


Soviet Mathematics and Economic Theory in the Past Century: An Historical Reappraisal
  • Preprint
  • File available

July 2024

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195 Reads

What are the effects of authoritarian regimes on scholarly research in economics? And how might economic theory survive ideological pressures? The article addresses these questions by focusing on the mathematization of economics over the past century and drawing on the history of Soviet science. Mathematics in the USSR remained internationally competitive and generated many ideas that were taken up and played important roles in economic theory. These same ideas, however, were disregarded or adopted only in piecemeal fashion by Soviet economists, despite the efforts of influential scholars to change the economic research agenda. The article draws this contrast into sharper focus by exploring the work of Soviet mathematicians in optimization, game theory, and probability theory that was used in Western economics. While the intellectual exchange across the Iron Curtain did help advance the formal modeling apparatus, economics could only thrive in an intellectually open environment absent under the Soviet rule.

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The Frame for the Not-Yet Existent: How American, European, and Soviet Scholars Jointly Shaped Modern Mathematical Economics

March 2024

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8 Reads

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2 Citations

History of Political Economy

This article tells the story of the first international topological conference in Moscow (1935), an outstanding event that, for the first time, brought together the most notable American, European, and Soviet mathematicians, including those who would later play decisive roles in the mathematization of economics: John von Neumann, Leonid Kantorovich, and Albert W. Tucker. The fact that Kantorovich was in contact with von Neumann and his closest colleagues, Solomon Lefschetz and Garrett Birkhoff, is hardly appreciated in the histories of mathematics and mathematical economics. Their brief academic exchange was interrupted by the increasing international isolation of Soviet mathematics and by the wars that ensued. The article provides a historical account of the conference and traces the intellectual and personal affinities of Soviet and non-Soviet mathematicians, as well as their conceptual innovations. It argues that the conference, as a singular event linking several research communities, mattered for the development of various formal frameworks and their dissemination, contributing to the intellectual landscape in which postwar mathematical economics could emerge. The article calls for a deeper analysis of conceptual affinities and motivations in applying mathematics to economics and for a more nuanced narrative linking these motivations to social and political contexts of economic modeling.


Topics of Interest (Multiple Choice, Most Frequent)
Topics of Interest Most Frequently Addressed by GET Theorists
Main Discipline of Study
Mobility, Most Important Centers
“RISE AND FALL” OF THE WALRASIAN PROGRAM IN ECONOMICS: A SOCIAL AND INTELLECTUAL DYNAMICS OF THE GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM THEORY

August 2023

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84 Reads

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2 Citations

Journal of the History of Economic Thought

This paper aims at understanding social practices and institutions that ensured the transnational diffusion, recognition, and renewal of the research program in the General Equilibrium Theory (GET), in spite of multiple critics and apparent theoretical dead ends. First, we trace the main conceptual developments of the Walrasian GET program since the 1950s and thus elaborate on its intellectual identity. Then, based on a systematic study of the educational and professional trajectories typical for several generations of GET scholars, we analyze a social form taken by this transnational and multidisciplinary “scientific community”: an institutional dynamics of the Walrasian GET program, most common career patterns, and the forms of international and intergenerational transmission. We construct a database of GET theorists and apply to this dataset a technique of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) in order to investigate the relational patterns between attribution of scientific credit (symbolic capital) and biographical properties in a transnational space of the GET scholars.


The Ontology of Uncertainty in Finance: The Normative Legacy of General Equilibrium

September 2021

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127 Reads

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4 Citations

Topoi

This paper considers in detail the ontological and normative presuppositions of the state-contingent approach to pricing commodities first introduced by Arrow (Le rôle des valeurs boursières pour la répartition la meilleure des risques. Econométrie, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, 1953) in his model of general equilibrium under uncertainty, which became a milestone in the theory of finance. By contextualizing Arrow’s fundamental contribution and subsequent developments in finance, it demonstrates how this new conceptual framework implied certain technologies—both intellectual and financial. In showing how theoretical thinking about finance was underlying institutional developments in finance, this paper complements the familiar narrative of the performativity of economics.


CfP: Serendipities. Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social Sciences

February 2021

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124 Reads

Matteo Bortolini

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Call for Papers: Serendipities. Welcome to the relaunch of Serendipities – Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social Sciences. As of December 2020, the journal is hosted by the Royal Danish Library (https://tidsskrift.dk/Serendipities). To mark our move to a new host and the reconfiguration of the editorial team, we welcome contributions to the journal, particularly those articles and book reviews that address the sociology and history of the social sciences in the broadest meaning of the description.


Realities of Formalization

September 2020

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11 Reads

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2 Citations

History of Political Economy

In the postwar USSR, there were a few scattered research groups engaged in research most closely resembling “Western” mainstream economics. Inspired by the new sciences of the artificial, these groups were able to make important contributions to various fields of economic theory. This article focuses on the story of one group created by the control engineer Mark Aizerman at the Institute of Control Sciences in Moscow. It discusses the origins and the outstanding diversity and dynamics of the group’s research agenda, reconstructs the factors that made Aizerman turn from the cybernetics of mechanical or biological systems to the abstract theory of choice and rationality, and demonstrates how the group was related to—and communicated with—the scholars doing work in social choice, mechanism design, and formal political theory. It also speculates on one missed research opportunity of doing experimental economics—something that, given the ideological and intellectual constraints Aizerman was facing, was hardly possible in the Soviet context, but could have been a synthesis of economics and engineering. The article also discusses a research culture Aizerman created and nurtured in his lab by encouraging research collaboration, sharing ideas, and freely moving across various disciplines.



Programming the USSR: Leonid V. Kantorovich in context

April 2020

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442 Reads

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10 Citations

The British Journal for the History of Science

In the wake of Stalin's death, many Soviet scientists saw the opportunity to promote their methods as tools for the engineering of economic prosperity in the socialist state. The mathematician Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) was a key activist in academic politics that led to the increasing acceptance of what emerged as a new scientific persona in the Soviet Union. Rather than thinking of his work in terms of success or failure, we propose to see his career as exemplifying a distinct form of scholarship, as a partisan technocrat, characteristic of the Soviet system of knowledge production. Confronting the class of orthodox economists, many factors were at work, including Kantorovich's cautious character and his allies in the Academy of Sciences. Drawing on archival and oral sources, we demonstrate how Kantorovich, throughout his career, negotiated the relations between mathematics and economics, reinterpreted political and ideological frames, and reshaped the balance of power in the Soviet academic landscape.



Citations (22)


... 244-247). Meanwhile, Alfred Marshall studied 'partial equilibria' (Marshall, 1890(Marshall, /2009 and later formulated the so-called 'general equilibrium theory' (GET), 3 setting the ground for modern supply and demand analysis (Walsh & Gram, 1980;Colander, 1995; for an account of GET see Kirtchik & Boldyrev, 2024). He also contributed to economics with the principle of substitution, the elasticity of demand, period analysis, as well as the concepts of dynamic equilibrium and marginal productivity (Robbins, 1998, pp. ...

Reference:

Qualitative Economics: Integrating Qualitative Research Methods into Economic Analysis
“RISE AND FALL” OF THE WALRASIAN PROGRAM IN ECONOMICS: A SOCIAL AND INTELLECTUAL DYNAMICS OF THE GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM THEORY

Journal of the History of Economic Thought

... He points out that this happens via formal assumptions of these theories that are in fact 'substantive normative assumptions' (Reiss, 2017, p. 138), such as the sure thing principle that 'tell[s] (…) individuals which features of a decision situation ought to be relevant to their preference over alternatives' (139). Similarly, yet at a more general level, Marcel Boumans and Davis (2015) argue that the rational choice theories equate preference satisfaction with being better off and in this way they provide 'a particular ethical interpretation of what it means to be better off ' (198). Daniel Hausmann and McPherson (2006) point out that the ethical principle of 'minimal benevolence' underlies these theories: a presumed value judgement stating that one should be able to make oneself better off by satisfying preferences. ...

Understanding Economics as a (Social) Science? (On the Book by M. Boumans, J. Davis “Economic Methodology. Understanding Economics as a Science”)
  • Citing Article
  • October 2012

Voprosy Ekonomiki

... The doctorate degrees were mainly obtained at eight universities identified in our analysis as the main "GET centers": UC Berkeley, Yale, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Minnesota, Princeton, and Rochester (see Table A4 in the online appendix). The founding GET figures (Kenneth Arrow, Gérard Debreu, Lionel McKenzie) and some other prominent GE theorists of the first and second generations (such as Herbert Scarf, see Table 4) proved to be active as advisors 15 Mathematical economists in the Soviet Union, for instance, got engaged with the GET exclusively through reading translations and original works (in periodicals) in this domain-thus, for the most part, staying invisible for the peers from the other side of the Iron Curtain, as, for instance, is the case of the Soviet GE theorists discussed in Boldyrev andKirtchik (2014, 2017). 16 In the American context, a PhD production highly concentrated at the top universities assured a higher level of consensus and standardization of the economics discipline (Fourcade 2009). of PhD students. ...

The Ontology of Uncertainty in Finance: The Normative Legacy of General Equilibrium

Topoi

... However, with his additional detailed analysis, Brisset denies their thesis, arguing that it is "simply false and non-performative, not self-fulfilling" (214). Although Brisset's interpretation of the establishment of the Black-Scholes-Merton model may be plausible, as Boldyrev (2020) has implied, it may look like a one-sided interpretation. The useful and provocative findings of MacKenzie and Millo (2003) and MacKenzie (2006) are that option traders rely on a theoretical model even though some of them do not understand it clearly, and the black box aspect of the theory may be central to the proposed performativity of option pricing models. ...

Technology, society, and performativity: on a new book by Nicolas Brisset: Economics and performativity: exploring limits, theories and cases, by Nicolas Brisset, London, Routledge, 2018, 300 pp., £120 (Hardback), ISBN 978-1-315-11207-7
  • Citing Article
  • April 2020

Journal of Economic Methodology

... The discovery of the role prices play in rational economic activity, emphasized informally by Mises (1920), was something Kantorovich himself considered to be his major contribution to economics and which, arguably, brought him the Nobel Memorial prize he shared with Koopmans in 1975. 12 And it was precisely this contribution that made his subsequent career as an economist in the USSR so difficult (Boldyrev and Düppe 2020). The actual application of linear optimization would require the deep reform of both Soviet economic science and the planning practicessomething hardly possible at the time. ...

Programming the USSR: Leonid V. Kantorovich in context

The British Journal for the History of Science

... . More recently, an annual supplement to History of Political Economy, entirely dedicated to the history of economic knowledge under socialism(Düppe and Boldyrev 2019), signals the increasing willingness of our field to take the ideas of economists working under dictatorship (or at least their histories) seriously. ...

Economic Knowledge in Socialism, 1945–89: Editors’ Introduction
  • Citing Article
  • September 2019

History of Political Economy

... Suzanne Wengle (2015, p. 131) summarises the common position regarding the marginal influence of ideas on politics in Russia by quoting Dmitri Trenin's claim that 'ideas hardly matter [in Russia], while interests reign supreme'. While Zweynert and Boldyrev (2017) identify a vibrant debate and a division between liberal and statist views among the scholarly community, they conclude that the impact of these views on Russian economic policy has been marginal. A similar position is found in the work of Bryan Taylor (2014) and Vladimir Gel'man (2018). ...

Conflicting Patterns of Thought in the Russian Debate on Modernisation and Innovation 2008–2013
  • Citing Article
  • August 2017

Europe-Asia Studies

... Most of them are devoted to specific scientists or individual episodes; we rely on them in further presentation. The evolution of the direction as a whole is discussed in monograph [4] and article [5], which examines the postwar period. N.S. ...

The cultures of mathematical economics in the postwar Soviet Union: More than a method, less than a discipline
  • Citing Article
  • April 2017

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A

... 3 Camic, Gross, and Lamont (2011), for example, has sociologists as editors and as the majority of its contributors. It is more common to focus on a single discipline-e.g., Stocking 1968;Fabiani 1988;Mirowski 1989;Park Turner and Turner 1990;Hands 2001;Calhoun 2007;Herman 2009;Heilbron 2015;Dayé and Moebius 2015. 4 For studies of the human and social sciences that break with methodological nationalism, see Pollak 1979;Gerhardt 2007;Heilbron, Guilhot, and Jeanpierre 2008;Steinmetz 2010;Pérez 2015;Baring 2016;Boldyrev and Kirtchik 2016;Kropp 2017. ...

On (im)permeabilities: Social and human sciences on both sides of the 'Iron Curtain
  • Citing Article
  • October 2016

History of the Human Sciences

... Arguing that performativity 'is not achieved by words alone' (MacKenzie, Muniesa, & Siu, 2007:3), layered performativity integrates the concept of agencement (Callon, 2010) which are socio-technical arrangements between humans and non-human actors such as calculative tools, models and rankings employed within institutions (Boedker, Chong, & Mouritsen, 2020;McLaren & Appleyard, 2020;Langley, 2010). As in the case of variegated subjectivities, agencement recognizes that practices might deviate from theoretical expectations, coined as overflows from theorized frames, distinguishing between misfires which are failures with regards to intended effects, and backfires which make the frame less relevant (Boldyrev & Svetlova, 2016;Mouritsen, Pedraza-Acosta, & Thrane, 2022;Vosselman, 2022). ...

Enacting Dismal Science: New Perspectives on the Performativity of Economics