The thesis of the book is that Jan Tinbergen was instrumental in creating a new kind of economist, the policy expert working in the service of government. In the case of Tinbergen, this sets up a tension between the pacifist and socialist ideals that he formed during his youth and his work as a technical expert who advised Western governments, international institutions (Chapter 8), and authoritarian governments, for instance in Turkey and Indonesia (Chapter 14 to Chapter 16). The tension between Tinbergen’s ideals and the limits of social engineering are always put in the wider context of the events unfolding, the two world wars and the interwar, the postwar period, and the construction of development economics, which became Tinbergen’s main interest after a trip to India awoke him to the reality of poverty (Chapter 12).

As biographies go, this is a very rich work that puts Tinbergen in the context of the social, political, and economic events taking place in the Netherlands, Europe, and the world. As someone with a limited knowledge of the history of Dutch political and social movements, I learned a lot about the socialist and social-democratic movement in this country (Chapter 3), the development of planning ideas and their use in Dutch economic policy (Chapter 5), or the construction during the war of the “Breakthrough Movement” that sought to bring down the pillarized Dutch society. Some pages are also dedicated to the work of Tinbergen during the German invasion, without any definite conclusions on Tinbergen’s involvement with the invader (Chapter 9); this is yet another place where the tension between ideals and technical expertise resurfaces. The final chapter (Chapter 19) gives an interesting attempt to present this tension as a natural ancestor to so-called neoliberal policies implemented since the 1980s. The continuity that is drawn between Tinbergen’s expertise and the transformation of economic policies since the end of the twentieth century challenges usual accounts of the origins of these policies.

Of course, it is possible to show this continuity only because the expertise that is presented to us has been emptied of its economic content. The case for such an approach is made by the author in the preface: “ideas go in and out of fashion. What has remained far more stable since the middle of the twentieth century is the position of economic experts” (p. xvi). This stance is reiterated at the beginning of Chapter 6, where Erwin Dekker tackles the macrodynamic and econometric work that earned Tinbergen his Nobel Prize: “the focus will be on his personal trajectory, which generates perspectives different from one that focuses on the development of these new academic fields” (p. 126). Such an approach introduces another tension, also running through the book, concerning the way in which Tinbergen is placed in the history of economics.

The tension rises from the fact that Dekker does mention the economic ideas developed by Tinbergen but refuses to see in them anything more than technical contributions. Focusing on those contributions would lead one to “miss the greater significance of his work” (p. 10); for Dekker, Tinbergen’s real input to economics is the very idea of economic expertise and social engineering (Chapter 10), in the service of universalist and socialist ideals: “Tinbergen is never primarily concerned with how to explain the world; the goal is always to improve it” (p. 13). This message is illustrated by the repeated links made between Tinbergen’s austere way of life, his dedication to his work, and his universalist values, which transformed his work into a moral responsibility, for him and by extension for his colleagues: “Tinbergen’s idea that development aid was a moral responsibility of the West” (p. 281). The sources of such a commitment to the betterment of humanity are found in his childhood and in the personal vision he acquired during his socialist youth, which are analyzed in Part I (“Becoming an Economic Expert”). The question is asked at the end of the book whether he received the right Nobel Prize, and whether he should not have received the Nobel Peace Prize, but again, there is a clear contradiction between Tinbergen’s ideals, their difficult applications, and his compromises with dictatorships. The book illustrates well that the universalist vision held by Tinbergen and his generation was just another ideology in disguise: their claims of building a better world for all of us, wantonly made and imperiously imposed, are always foiled by the diversity of reality.

At the end of the book, the author circles back to Tinbergen’s vision, arguing that it evolved throughout his life and kept motivating his work, as Tinbergen aimed to improve the world through his expertise. This is where I find the book most lacking: visions take shape only once they are mediated by a language into something more tangible, which can be shared and discussed. In return, the language shapes the vision itself, as every writer knows. The contribution of the econometricians, and especially those interested in macrodynamics, was precisely to create a new language that gave shape to their different visions and resulted in different models of the economy. Eschewing the language prevents, in a fundamental way, the reader from grasping those visions, and how they took shape in economic models.

For instance, Dekker sees as a paradox the idea that “business-cycle scholars were attempting to make economic theory more dynamic … [b]ut the goal of most scholars, including Tinbergen, was to suggest how to make the economy more stable” (pp. 135–136). There’s no paradox here: the econometricians developed a language of economic dynamics precisely because they thought that it was the only way to talk about stability, which was always defined in their models in reference to a dynamic process. Tinbergen received his Nobel Prize “for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes” (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1969/tinbergen/facts), and he did develop many different dynamic models in the 1930s that sought to represent long and short cycles (Tinbergen Reference Tinbergen1931, Reference Tinbergen1935a), growth processes (Tinbergen Reference Tinbergen1942), the influence of multiple equilibria on economic policies (Tinbergen Reference Tinbergen1935b, Reference Tinbergen1937), and even models of economic collapse (Tinbergen Reference Tinbergen1934, Reference Tinbergen1936). The ideas that took shape through these models influenced his way of thinking about the complexity of the world and the importance of shocks, which could take a much more important meaning in the presence of multiple equilibria as the economy was bumped between high and low levels of employment.

Contrary to the position of the author, in my own work on Tinbergen and other econometricians, I have taken the position that ideas matter because once they are expressed, especially in models, they can change our way of thinking, and this provokes a feedback that ensures that ideas are always moving (Assous and Carret Reference Assous and Carret2022a, Reference Assous and Carret2022b, Reference Assous and Carretforthcoming). Their going “in and out of fashion” does not preclude ideas from influencing the world we live in, and it seems strange to deprive the reader of the main product of such an original thinker as Tinbergen, who was so instrumental in developing the dynamic language of the early econometricians. Because this language was developed through his interactions with other economists, I also missed the wider embedding of Tinbergen in the larger economics community, as it was this group that developed with him the language as well as the idea of social engineering and economic expertise. It seems to me that a biography is not the best place to make a claim about the development of economic expertise, which is inherently a group phenomenon that cannot be well captured in the study of one individual. How can one understand the rise of expertise without taking into account the development of a common practice, the increase in the demand of this expertise, and the subtle interplay and feedback between this new supply and its demand?

The book is clearly addressed to a much wider public than that of economists or historians of economics, and it is perhaps unfair to ask of it something that was not promised. The premise is after all that ideas do not matter, so we can hardly be surprised that Dekker finds Tinbergen to be more an expert than a theoretician. The cultural history that is presented is very informed and informative, and anyone reading the book will certainly get something out of it.