Milieu 03 of 12
RAND and the systems-analysis state
Governance by model starts here, and the quiet power is not surveillance but the authority of the model that decides which options are visible.
- Years
- From 1948
- Location
- Santa Monica, California
- Funder
- United States Air Force, after being spun out of Douglas Aircraft
- Institution
- RAND Corporation, the first modern think tank
The climate
Nuclear standoff. The central problems could not be experimented on, so they had to be modelled instead, and that put enormous authority into formalism: game theory, operations research, linear programming, systems analysis.
A model is not a lie. It is a set of assumptions that has to be explicit enough to compute. The trouble starts when the assumptions travel.
Who was in the room
John von Neumann. Albert Wohlstetter. Thomas Schelling. Herman Kahn. Kenneth Arrow. Bernard Brodie. Later Daniel Ellsberg, whose defection makes him the best inside witness this cluster has.
What came out of it
Rational-choice assumptions built for deterrence migrated outward into welfare policy, education, policing and management, carrying an implicit picture of the human being with them: the strategic, self-interested actor. Nobody in those other fields chose that anthropology. It arrived with the method.
Control here is not somebody watching you. It is the model deciding which options appear on the page at all.
Key works. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (1960). Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (1960), which is genuinely hard to read and worth the discomfort. Ellsberg, Secrets (2002) and The Doomsday Machine (2017).
What it adds
This is where bureaucracy acquires its modern intellectual authority. Weber described officials applying rules. RAND produced officials applying models, which is harder to argue with because the argument now requires the same mathematics.
Institutional history
S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy (2003), on how rational choice became the default language of legitimacy. Paul Erickson and colleagues, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind (2013), on Cold War rationality as a specific historical object rather than a timeless standard.