Abstract
The first time the concept of a ‘programming approach’ (PA) was set out in Frisch’s work was during the late 1950s and 1960s, when the development of national and regional plans spread throughout Western Europe as well in developing countries (during the first decade of development at the United Nations, United Nations Development Programme, World Bank, etc.).
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Notes
- 1.
This expression (‘programming approach’), as previously mentioned, was used by Ragnar Frisch for the first time to my knowledge in the essay entitled ‘Economic Planning and the Growth Problem in Developing Countries’ (1961a, republished in F. Long ed., 1976, pp. 175–195). I do not know if it was used with any linguistic authority, Norwegian being his mother tongue, but it had a certain semantic correctness, as we will see in this chapter. The expression introduces a highly appropriate neologism. ‘Programmatic’ is defined in ‘The Living Webster’ as ‘pertaining to or of the nature of a program’, and the adjective drawn from the verb ‘to programme’ is defined as to ‘make a program or definite plan’. I also note that an English political science scholar, Richard Rose, employed the phrase ‘programmatic approach’ in the title of one of his books (Rose 1984), but with reference to the programmes of political parties, a theme that is distant from ours. Unfortunately, an international glossary of words such as ‘plan’, ‘programme’ and ‘policy’ is yet to be created, and these words are currently employed as conventional ad hoc expressions, often with different meanings from language to language. ‘Programmatic’, for instance, is often expressed in English (in addition to what I said in the previous observation) as ‘policy-oriented’, or ‘decision-oriented’.
Recently I have proposed the neologism ‘planology’, in order to indicate the whole of scientific works and disciplines concerning planning in its larger meanings and uses, without further adjectives added. I like this nomenclature (and its derivatives), since it expresses the trans-disciplinary move towards a kind of a neo-disciplinary, from the sciences (plural) of planning towards a unitary, integrated and comprehensive planning science (singular) (see Archibugi 1992, 2007 and the introduction and conclusions of this trilogy).
In this book, however, I have resisted adopting the term ‘planologic approach’ in place of ‘programming approach’ for two reasons: first, because such an adoption presupposes a full acquisition of its meaning and of its concept, which is the sole objective of this trilogy, and so it would not be appropriate to take it as a given before we proceed; and secondly because, as this book is essentially dedicated to a large-scale reproduction and revival of Frischian texts, I want to conform strictly to Frisch’s terminology.
- 2.
A survey about Frisch’s writings in the Annotated bibliography of publication of R. Frisch compiled by Olaf Bjerkholt (April 1995, mimeo) induced me only to consider where he makes reference to this ‘logic’ of the programming approach. The papers to which I will make reference and from which I will extract some quotations are:
-
A.
Generalities on Planning, a curious case of an original text published as Memorandum DE-UO (27 February 1957, pp. 26), published also in English by an Italian academic journal, ‘L’industria’ (December 1959, edited by Ferdinando Di Fenizio, editor of the journal), and moreover later translated into Italian in 1959 (by myself) and republished by Federico Caffé (one of the few economists familiar in Italy with the works of Frisch) in a book he edited, the short anthology Economisti Moderni (Milano, Garzanti, 1962) Economisti moderni [Modern economists].
This paper was not republished by Frank Long in his selection of Frischian papers (1976) dedicated specifically to economic planning studies; or by Olav Bjerkholt in the monumental selection of Frisch’s econometric works (1995). Therefore it remained unpublished (except in the English text in the Italian journal). This is a pity, and I shall provide an abundant number of citations in this book to make up for this absence. It seems to me that this was the first writing in which he became aware of the epistemological overturning of the programming approach (even if many parts of this Memorandum we will find in his successive works).
-
B.
Economic Planning and the Growth problem in Developing Countries (published in Norwegian in Statsokonomisk Tidsskrift, 1961, p. 115–135; republished as Memo of the DE-UO (1962, 15 pp. as Lecture at the United Nations International Seminar in Norway (Gol, Halingdal) 8–17 August 1962); republished in the posthumous volume of writings edited by Long, 1976 (publ. by D. Reidel), but not in that edited by Olav Bjerkholt in 1995.
-
C.
Preface to the Oslo Channel Model, A Survey of Types of Economic Forecasting and Programming. Memo of the DE-UO N.15 (October 1961, p. 44) for a Asepelt volume, edited by R. C. Geary, Europe’s Future in Figures, Amsterdam: North-Holland 1962, republished in both the selection by Frank Long (1976) and in the selection by Olaf Bjerkholt (1995).
-
D.
An implementation system for optimal national economic planning without detailed quantity from a central authority, as Memo of the DE-UO 1963, 40 pp.; (posthumous reprint in Frisch (by Long, ed. and Reidel, pub.) 1976 and also in 1995 (by Bjerkholt, ed.).
-
E.
General Outlook on a method of advanced and democratic macroeconomic planning, two lectures prepared for a Summer Session of CIME (Centro Internazionale Matematico Estivo) in L’Aquila 30 Aug–7 Sept. 1965. English original, [Not republished in the posthumous collections of Long (1976) and Bjerkholt (1995); and for this paper I shall provide an abundant supply of citations to make up for this absence].
For complete bibliographic references for Frisch’s writings, please see the Bibliography in Vol. II.
-
A.
- 3.
This source for the quotations from the writings of Ragnar Frisch consists, except in those cases differently indicated, of a publication called ‘Memoranda’ from the Department of Economics of the University of Oslo, dating from the ‘reign’ of Ragnar Frisch; this is referred to as DE-UO (therefore Memoranda of the DE-UO).
- 4.
Note that all italics in the quotations are in the original text by Frisch.
- 5.
- 6.
Here Frisch adds, in a note:
There is perhaps a chance of proceeding part of the way towards the programming solution of the implementation problem by considering the interplay between real flows and financial flows. Work on a research project in this direction, the refi-project (re = real, fi = financial) has been done at the DE-UO, but I shall not be concerned with this here.’ (See Frisch biblio: (1966))
- 7.
Here is another note by Frisch:
In the selection analysis we are able to build the theory on a precise and quantitatively formulated model with a fair degree of correspondence with economic realities. This ensures a fair degree of reliability of the conclusions. In the implementation problem we have to consider many effects and behaviouristic relations that it is – at least so far – difficult to measure with a satisfactory degree of precision.
- 8.
The word ‘structure’ applied to a plan (programme or planning structuring) is a key word (and a connected concept) that is used by the authors of the programming approach that we are relaunching in this book, and in a special way by Frisch and Leontief. Since their time, this has been applied and implemented, on a less extensive scale but more effectively, through strategic planning. The best example of this is the strategic plan that every agency of the US federal government is obliged to supply to the nation every five years, monitoring, evaluating and updating budget expenditure; this has been the case since the 1993 GPR Act. For the effective implementation of planning in the USA, see my works Archibugi, (Macmillan, 2000) and Archibugi (Springer, 2008). We will come back to strategic planning in Chap. 8, Vol. II.
- 9.
As a major industrialist said (the quotation is from Frisch): ‘It can hardly be any difference of opinion that the country should have as its objective larger volume of production and fuller employment so that the standard of living of the people may be raised as speedily as possible.’ Frisch considers morally harmful phrases of this kind, which are very common and pronounced by everybody, to be of little sense and contradictory. He thinks that the planner should be the last person to pronounce them and the first to fight against them, because they are misleading regarding the concept of planning. But he says this with the following ironic metaphor, often repeated had referred to as the ‘ladies’ shoes metaphor’: ‘We all know the desire of our ladies to have shoes that look neat, not large and clumsy. And we also know the desire to have the comfortably large. It can therefore be no difference of opinion that our ladies’ shoes should be made small on the outside in order that they may be large on the inside. A main purpose of the ·optimality technique is to compromise between the conflicting objectives.’ [Frisch, 1958, Generalities on planning, (in: ‘L’industria’, cit., 1959 p. 405].
- 10.
How useful it would be, for their role and task, if union leaders understood this point!
- 11.
Let me recall, regarding this argument, a previous contribution of mine (1957), ‘Pianificazione economica e contrattazione collettiva’ (Economic Planning and Collective Bargaining’, in ‘Studi economici’ (Journal of the Economics Faculty, University of Naples), 1957.
- 12.
This is the argument that is often tediously used, even by respected economists who have common sense, that calls for an ‘economics for the common people’. This is like calling for, in the face of problems with a concrete building, an ‘engineering for the common people’. For the ‘ordinary people’, it is very important to have in economics and in engineering a high level of technical security, instead of just a lot of talk about it. In addition, it is important to have computing capacity that can cope with the data availability, and not just with concepts expressed by algebraic formulae. This latter allows only for simplifications, which in planning decisions and analysis are dangerous and misleading.
- 13.
See the work by Frisch (1954); ‘La theorie de l’avantage collectif et les regions de Pareto’, ‘Economie Appliquée’; see bibliographic reference.
- 14.
There is in the Bibliography of Kåre N. Edvardsen cit. (2001) a mention of a Memorandum of the DE-UO of 1957 which has the same title. I could not judge how closely it corresponds with the text published in English in the ‘L’industria’ in 1959. If identical, this essay should be dated 1957, instead of 1959. This significant paper of Frisch’s, published by an Italian journal, unfortunately has neither been republished nor included in the cited collection of posthumous papers, including Economic Planning Studies edited by Frank Long (1976), nor in that monumental reprint of the integral works of Frisch edited by Olaf Bjerkholt (1995) (see bibl. Refer.). Regarding this latter omission, I fear that this may have been my personal responsibility. When I first encountered Olaf in Rome (when he was searching for marginal writings of and on Frisch in Italian), I am not certain I brought this paper to his attention. It was published in English (despite being in an Italian journal), and I received it in the form of a reprint copy, which was sent by Frisch himself after our first meeting in Rome in 1963 (See Appendix, Vol. I). This was a real pity, because—in my opinion—this paper constitutes a crucial point of departure, which allows us to obtain a clearer vision of the nexus between econometric work and its general subordination to general planning methodology, which cannot be found within Frisch’s other work. In fact, there is no other place in which he systematically describes this in an ordered and sequential way, without any repetition or duplication. I hope that my reconstruction of the Frischian thought processes in this trilogy, necessarily synthetic, but with many original quotations, will set forth the development of his methodology in a more orderly way.
- 15.
We must not forget that in 1959 we were on the eve of a wave of attempts across Europe to establish institutions and procedures for national planning and to define their modalities and forms (which we talked about in Chap. 3).
- 16.
Readers who do not care to delve into the technical aspects of the process can proceed directly to the conclusion about the Frischian vision of planning in Chap. 4, Vol. III.
Bibliographical References to Chapter 4 (Vol. I)
Archibugi, F. (1992). ‘The resetting of planning studies’, in: A. Kuklinski, ed., Society, Science, Government, Warsaw: KBN.
Archibugi, F. (2007). Planning Theory: From the Political Debate to the Methodological Reconstruction. Springer.
Bjerkholt, O. (1995). An annotated bibliography of publications of R. Frisch.
Edvardsen Kare, N. (2001). Ragnar Frisch: An Annotated Bibliography, Department of Economics, University of Oslo, DE-UO.
Frisch, R. (1954). ‘La theorie de l’avantage collectif et les regions de Pareto’, ‘Economie Appliquée’, Tome VII, Numero 3, Juillet-Septembre.
Frisch, R. (1957). Oslo Decision Models, etc. Memorandum, Institute of Economics, Univ. of Oslo.
Frisch, R. (1958). ‘Generalities on Planning’, In: ‘L’Industria’, ottobre-dicembre 1958.
Frisch, R. (1959). The principle of Recursive Planning.
Frisch, R. (1961a). ‘Economic Planning and the Growth Problem in Developing Countries’, in: Stasoekonomisk Tidsskrift, 2/3, 1961. Repub. in: Frisch, R. (1976) F. Lang ed.
Frisch, R. (1961b). ‘Numerical Determination of a Quadratic Preference Function for use in Macroeconomic Programming’. In: ‘Giornale degli Economisti e Annali di Economia’, Vol. 20 (February 1961). [Repub. in: Olav Bjerkholt, ed. Foundations of Modern Econometrics. etc. (see) 1995, Vol. II, pp. 35–75].
Frisch, R. (1965). ‘General Outlook on a method of advanced and democratic macroeconomic planning’, (paper presented at CIME Study Week, L’Aquila, 29 Agosto–7 Settembre 1965). In: de Finetti ed., Mathematical Optimization in Economics, Roma: Cremonese Edizioni 1966.
Frisch, R. (1966). ‘A Generalized Form of the REFI Interflow Table’, in Kowalik, T. ed., Problems of economic dynamic and planning (Essays in honour of Michal Kalecki, Warszawa 1966, Polish Scientific Press (Pergamon Press).
Long, Frank. (1976), ed., Ragnar Frisch Economic Planning Studies Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht.
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Archibugi, F. (2019). Basic Requirements for the Programming Approach. In: The Programming Approach and the Demise of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78057-3_4
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