The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) awarded Mary Baldwin Professor of Economics Judy Klein an individual grant to complete research for her upcoming book. Klein is currently on sabbatical for the fall, and the grant will enable her to take an additional semester off for research and writing. This project will investigate “the links between control engineering, operations research, and economics in the late 20th century,” according to Klein. Her project will examine how military needs during World War II and the Cold War led engineers and applied mathematicians to an economic way of thinking about scarce resources.
INET — a global network of thousands of economic thinkers, from Nobel laureates to students — aims to develop new ways of economic thinking that can tackle 21st-century challenges. INET has created this grant program in response to the current financial crisis. “The 2007–2008 credit markets seizure ushered in a crisis in economics as well as in the economy. Knowledge of how we got there is important for recovery from both crises,” Klein explains. The institute supports scholars whose work addresses significant lapses or inadequacies in current economic thinking. With this grant program, INET hopes to foster new approaches in economic theory and practice.
