The Cowles Commission for Research in Economics was based at the University of Chicago from 1939 to 1955. In that period it built the foundations of modern econometrics, fought and won the most consequential methodological debate of the twentieth century, and was then pushed out of the department that hosted it. The intellectual victory and the institutional defeat happened in the same room, at the same time, and were not unrelated. The standard accounts treat the 1955 move to Yale as an administrative event. Better terms, family ties, Connecticut tax law. The real story is that two visions of empirical economics had been competing for the same department, and only one of them was going to survive.
Exellent essay in economic history.
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