In the USA
Both the Ecole de Lausanne’s Viennese legacies ran in parallel over the twentieth century, and sometimes intersected, particularly in the United States and at the Cowles Commission especially.
The Kreis’s posterity expressed itself there in the early development of econometrics and its neo-positivist concerns, and the legacy of the Mathematisches Kolloquium gave rise to the neo-Walrasian programme with leanings towards Bourbaki (Debreu). In the beginning, the general equilibrium became a type of applied economics and was operationalized. Pareto’s work was called upon in the emergence of the movement for econometrics and in the development of the input-output approach as well as linear programming. The influence of the Kreis’s neo-positivist Vienna seems dominant in this case and, for that matter, the latter’s programme is explicitly associated with the rise of econometrics. Cowles Commission members (and affiliates), such as Tjalling Koopmans, Wassily Leontief, George Dantzig and Jacob Marschak, took part in the empirical vision of the general equilibrium, while departing from a la National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) empiricism, as evidenced by the controversy over “measurement without theory”. However, because members of the Mathematische Kolloquium such as von Neumann and Wald, emigrated to the United States, the Cowles Commission became a meeting place between the two Viennese schools, fostering the development of the neo-Walrasian programme.In 1954, Arrow and Debreu identified the conditions of existence of the general equilibrium. This demonstration, plus Lionel McKenzie’s in 1959, as well as the one on the uniqueness of the equilibrium, raised hopes that were soon qualified by doubts about its stability (Scarf 1960) and finally challenged by Hugo Sonnenschein’s (1972), Rolf Mantel’s (1974) and Debreu’s (1974) results.
The general equilibrium as a research programme suffered a breakpoint then, which did not prevent it from keeping up its status of a preferred way to look at reality in a number of contemporary theories. Above all, the applied aspect of the general equilibrium outweighs axiomatic issues in computable general equilibrium models, whose numerical algorithms are rather indifferent to the equilibrium theoretical lack of stability.Harvard is the other landmark of American participation in the legacy of the Ecole de Lausanne’s general equilibrium. On one hand, within the Harvard Pareto circle, members had read the Treatise of general sociology and discussed the concept of general equilibrium from very different perspectives. On the other hand, Harvard hosted in the 1930s a number of European economists familiar with the general equilibrium, such as Joseph Schumpeter and Wassily Leontief. It was in this context that an occasional member of the Harvard Pareto circle, Paul Anthony Samuelson, wrote a doctoral thesis whose publication in 1947, entitled Foundations of Economic Analysis, became the canonical form of mathematical economics.