Epilogue

Summary

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.