FROM RED VIENNA TO COMPUTOPIA

As I sit here staring at a laptop, it seems one of the most histronic statements in the world to insist that computers have a politics. It would appear that I could effortlessly bend this machine – small, portable, and eminently personal (though perhaps a little too warm and nowhere near cuddly) – to whatever idiosyncratic purposes I might harbor. However much it may now sport a tabula rasa on its user-friendly face, that was definitely not the way it was viewed in the first half of the century. An economist in the runup to the 1950s would have almost inevitably associated a fascination with the existence of something called a computer with a leftish inclination to believe that market economies could be controlled through some form of scientific planning. Although this political connotation was left out of the account of the rise of the three postwar schools of neclassical economics in the previous chapter, its continued omission would be unpardonable. Because the confluence of computation, mathematical economics, and state planning is a key theme in the histories of the Cowles Commission and RAND, a basic prerequisite for understanding the cyborg incursion into economics is a passing acquaintance with the perfervid question of “market socialism” in the 1930s and 1940s.