Friday, September 01, 2006

Classic Cowles Commission Conference On Activity Analysis

Gabriel Mihalache notes that the Cowles Commission has made available for free downloading the 1951 proceedings of Activity Analysis of Production and Allocation. I have never read this before, but I have seen frequent references to this conference. All sorts of interesting people participated. For example, you can find contributions from Dantzig, Georgescu-Roegen, Samuelson, Arrow, Herbert Simon, and Morgenstern. I once had the privilege of working with a professor who, when an undergaduate at Columbia, learned linear algebra in a class taught by Koopmans.

I've previously downloaded various papers available from the Cowles Commission. They sponsored so much important work, I'm not even going to try to mention selections.

If you want to look at dead tree editions, another classic contribution from that milieu is Robert Dorfman, Paul A. Samuelson, and Robert M. Solow's Linear Programming and Economic Analysis.

Luigi L. Pasinetti's Lectures on the Theory of Production is a later and great textbook in the Sraffian tradition that contains something of a response to Dorfman, Samuelson, and Solow. (Amazon has mischaracterized it.)

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