Some Things Never Change

Again, physicists wanted to be paid by the military but not be in the military; physicists wanted to do social research for the military, but not be social scientists; physicists wanted to tell others what to do, but not be responsible for the commands given. To be granted these dispensations, they somehow had to innovate new roles balancing this delicate combination of engagement and aloofness from the chain of command. [operations research] turned the humble role of consultant into a fully fledged “discipline,” with everything that implies. The reason that OR became so important after the war was not due to any particular technical innovation or bit of mathematical wizardry; rather, it was the workshop where the postwar relationship between the natural scientists and the state was forged, and, inadvertently, the site where neoclassical economics became integrated into the newfound scientific approach to government, corporate management, and the very conceptualization of society as a cybernetic entity. The fact that OR could boast no uniform roster of practices did not mean that it was incapable of having profound effect upon the intellectual content of academic disciplines such as economics, psychology, and even computer science. To complicate matters further, the situation was subsequently occluded by the intervention of cultural factors: OR looked different when constituted in Britain, or America, or on the European continent, or in the former Soviet Union; and much of this can be traced to the vicissitudes of World War II, divergent state policies towards science, and ensuing local interactions with culturally variant conceptions of economics.

Mirowski, Philip (2001–12–03). Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (p. 182). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.