On December 6 1916, the evening before his examination on the theory of heat, Kiev polytechnical institute student Jacob Marschak was thrown in jail

He was 18

(I don’t know if the night was dark and foggy)

1/n https://twitter.com/MattZeitlin/status/1262906700966825989

2/n The Czar police had found Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus in the apartment where Marshak was staying, and that was suspect.

Indeed, after taking statistics lessons from Slutsky, read Marx and Hegel, he had turned into a pacifist Menshevik activist

He was freed a few months later, when the revolution reached Ukraine, started his military service, soon ended because of Oct 1917 events, and went to North Caucasus to recover from pneumonia, teach mathematics and live ‘quite bourgeois’ for a few months. Alas...

4/n ... he got embroiled in civil war between Bolsheviks, Cossacks & Moslems and found himself nominated secretary of Labor of short-lived Terek republic

His job included propaganda, overseeing the collectivization of oil pipes, printing money & avoiding inflation (sort of)

5/n A dictator seized over. Marschak had to flee, cross mountains by foot, starved, thought his sister has been shot, finally found her, caught the Spanish Flu on a boat, almost died, finally reached Kiev to be reunited w/ family

(Marschak is 2nd row, black tie, fierce eye)

A Jew & Menshevick, he found it safer to emigrate in Germany

At 20, he was introduced to mathematized marxism by Bortkiewicz in Berlin, moved to Heidelberg where he defended a dissertation under Lederer, was taught by Weber & Jaspers, got married to Marianne, a psychologist

7/n Marschak contributed socialist calculation debate against von Mises (he argued that b/c of monopolistic distortions of capitalism, price system was better administered in socialist system)

Became journalist for Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung, then worked for labor unions...

directed a study in export industries for Reichstag, advocated public works years before Keynes, wrote on fascism after visting Italia

Back to Heidelberg, defended habilitation which was an early theoretical/econometric analysis of elasticity of demand, taught Richard Musgrave

Before being dismissed by Nazis, warned by Leo Szilard, Marschak & family emigrated, again

Settled in Oxford, where he opened the Institute of Statistics. W/ Helen Makower, introduced portfolio approach to demand of money, wrote on labor mobility, & uses of budget studies

10/n Went to US in 1938, thought safer to stay. Like many migrants, settled at New School, set up a NBER econometrics/math econ seminar attended by Arrow, Chernoff, Christ, Haavelmo, Anderson, Rubin, Klein & his future grad students Modigliani and Patinkin https://twitter.com/Undercoverhist/status/1264161029572964352

11/n Seminar was where all of them presented contributions to underlying Keynesian theory & estimation techniques for simultaneous equations models, which Marschak reframed as providing foundations of rational economic policy when he became Cowles director at Chicago in 1943-47

In meantime, Von Neumann & Morgentern had proposed their expected utility axiomatics, which Marschak praised, refined & disseminate. Increasingly turned to stochastic decision theory (trying to retain rationality while relaxing transitivity to make choice less deterministic)

After a stay at Stanford's CASBS had introduced him to experiments, scaling techniques, psychometric prob theory and cured him of his “previous parochialism” & skepticism toward psychology, he got into experimenting with Davidson, Block & DeGroot, turned to information theory …