68 Chapter 2
The most prominent pioneer and precursor to economic cybernetics was
Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986), a prodigious polymath who contributed
to the fields of mathematics, economics, and computer architecture. Kan-
torovich has been compared to John von Neumann (1903–1957), another
polymath born of middle-class Jewish parents in early twentieth-century
eastern Europe to contribute to the same fields (figure 2.1).^26 Kantorovich’s
work on computationally optimizing economic exchanges, which later
became known as linear modeling, began before World War II.^27 The only
Soviet economist to be awarded a Nobel Prize (1975), Kantorovich developed
linear modeling in 1939 to balance a series of competing variables algorith-
mically. A simple example adds a dash of dust bowl empiricism to its compu-
tational merger of both profit and planning logics. Suppose that farmers—or
after Stalin in the 1930s, the managers of a collectivized farm—distribute
crops across their fields and that the farmers know the cost of fertilizer and
pesticide, the cost of planting, and the selling price of wheat and barley. A
linear programmer can determine how much land they should devote to
each to optimize their annual yield. Linear modeling—now evolved into the
field of linear programming—allows the farm managers to calculate in matrix
form the maximum revenue, or profit, that they can expect from their avail-
able resources and to know how best to distribute their crops (for example,
how much barley and how much wheat to plant).^28
Figure 2.1
Leonid Kantorovich