The Introduction presents the perspective and main arguments of the book. It situates the book’s subject and approach in the historiography of the social sciences, delineates how it draws on historical epistemologies, and sketches how it contributes to histories of the politics of growth.

In the course of the 1960s, mathematical modeling gradually stabilized as the primary mode of academic economic research. The Epilogue sketches the fate of “the Solow model” as it consolidated as an epistemic standard for an intellectual practice that focused on refining mathematical artifacts and using them to estimate model-relationships in any given data sets. Building on the idea that it already developed a life of its own at Solow’s desk, the Epilogue inquires into the movements and transformations of the multifarious artifact. It was adapted, extended, and reduced in relation to specific local, institutional, and strategic arrangements in planning offices, universities, and research institutions. Sketching some of its trajectories in the field of growth accounting and macroeconomic management, I wonder how the model sedimented into knowledge infrastructures and how the model’s knowledge, as precarious as it might have been, was equipped with computability, prognostic potential, and policy effectiveness.

This chapter focuses on micro encounters engendered by the Yale Peruvian Expedition, exploring via textual and photographic evidence the racial scientific research that shaped encounters in Peru between expedition members and Indigenous and Mestizo peoples, some of whom served as the expedition’s workers and assistants. Reading these sources in relation to the broader context of rural unrest in the Cusco region, the emergence of an urban and university-based indigenista movement that promoted the study of Indigenous peoples, and the rise of American-led expedition science, Warren questions how different groups imagined and contested the moral and ethical dimensions of such work. He argues that when measured and photographed, Indigenous and Mestizo research subjects ultimately subverted the expedition’s efforts to document accurate visual depictions of racial types. Drawing on the concept of ethnographic refusal in Indigenous Studies while also identifying other forms of engagement, Warren criticizes the univocal conception of moral fields as the possession of imperial researchers but not of Indigenous and Mestizo people subjected to their gaze.

Throughout this book, we see economic modelers distancing themselves from any explanatory power or realist intentions of their artifacts. Chapter 5 takes a closer look at such utterings as a specific kind of model talk that accompanied modeling as a practice. Frequently, such talk related to the power of mathematics as a language, centering on the greater “virility” of transparent and unambiguous mathematical methods compared to their verbal counterparts and predecessors. In contrast, I focus on instances in which economists grappled with their tricky artifacts and their messy practices. The talk surrounding Solow’s model turned it into a didactic device, a prototype for larger-scale planning models, an imagery of a world that macroeconomic management was capable of creating, and a part of a toolbox that equipped economists as “little thinkers” with technically sound and rationally appropriate knowledge. While model talk in the first place emphasized the epistemic and political tentativeness of models, Solow’s model turned into the epitome of what graduates called the “MIT style of modeling.”

This chapter rethinks Indigenous bodies and remains as unstable sources of scientific knowledge during a period of great violence and settler expansion: the late nineteenth-century incursions into Indigenous lands in Southern Argentina. Rodriguez compares the experiences of two prominent anthropologists, one an outsider (the German Rudolf Virchow) and one an insider-outsider (Argentine scientist Francisco P. Moreno) to show how their methods both overlapped and diverged based on their positionality. Rodriguez reads the scientists’ reports of their own emotive states as well as their interpretation of Indigenous peoples’ against the grain, revealing that underneath the authoritative scientific conclusions lay uncertainty and unease.

This chapter serves as one of two epilogues to this volume. In it, María Elena García focuses on three main themes: (1) the authors’ encounter with Indigenous Studies; (2) the importance of engaging with Native ideas of affect; and (3) the significance of thinking with haunting and ghosts as central to reimagining the history of science in the Americas. García explores the possibilities and limitations of placing Indigenous Studies next to decolonial scholarship and reflects on how or if this approach offers transformative frameworks for writing about and practising the “human sciences.” She also offers some thoughts about the place and significance of the more-than-human in this book, with a particular focus on ghosts, spirits, bones, and other entities that haunt the history of the human sciences. Finally, García takes inspiration from theorists engaging in multisensorial analysis to consider the “structures of feeling” that were both part of the extractive and colonial mode of the human sciences, and that might also emerge once we center Indigenous Studies values like radical relationality, reciprocity, and accountability in our writing, teaching, and mentorship.

This chapter examines the published work and careers of American conservationist William Vogt and Brazilian physician-geographer Josué de Castro during the early Cold War. It emphasizes the different affective strategies that the two men employed to persuade readers of their competing positions regarding the relationship between human population, arable land, food supply, and global security. As a briefly prominent intellectual from the global South, De Castro challenged the emerging, US-led consensus that population control was essential for economic development. Based on his own experiences among marginalized Brazilians, De Castro viewed Vogt’s concern with “carrying capacity” limits as an imperialist imposition on the autonomy of less empowered people. He feared that prioritizing population reduction as the solution to resource scarcity would undermine movements for social and economic transformation, such as agrarian reform in rural Latin America. With little personal experience of the world’s poor, Vogt projected a pessimistic vision of the future on continents overrun by desperate, starving hordes. De Castro’s contrasting vision, on the other hand, stemmed from frequent encounters with the chronically hungry and a more sympathetic understanding of their plight.

This epilogue closes the volume by inviting us to reflect on the afterlives of culturally significant items when they are returned to the original Native communities. Examining Harvard University’s Peabody museum’s return of a totem pole to the Gitxaała Nation in late 2022 followed by a ceremony in the museum a few months later in Spring 2023 Soto Laveaga ponders what it means to close “a circle that should never have been opened” as a member of the Gitxaała Nation described. How will narratives of troubling encounters like this one be narrated in the future when a coda explains that, hopefully, an object has been returned? How will museums curate spaces vacated by objects that were never meant to be exhibited on walls or in cases? Moreover, how will the stories be told when ancestrally powerful objects imbued with living spirits return home? As we enter a new era of repatriation centered on respect and reciprocity, this epilogue reminds us that when it comes to collecting, the human sciences, and Indigenous people the story remains far from finished.

Chapter 2 highlights the use and effects of Solow’s model as an instrument of measurement. It relates the model to the postwar politics of growth and productivity and a line of inquiry that sought to gauge the national whole in terms of monetary units. Existing measurement practices at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) involved the activities of collecting, compiling, and processing data; its researchers complemented and qualified their numbers with descriptive, verbal accounts about how the data had been made and how different measurement procedures led to different results. Here, the model reordered knowledge and nonknowledge about productivity. While commentators were shocked by its utter constructivism and disregard for the ways data were made, it offered a seemingly clean-cut method of measurement that turned statistical inference into a technical procedure. Whatever the model’s neoclassical reading of numbers did not account for was efficiently stashed away in a residual term labeled “technical change.” While Solow explicitly noted that the rest captured all kinds of (relevant) things, the technique remained and was soon denoted “the Solow residual.”