Walter Isard

Walter Isard (April 19, 1919, Philadelphia – November 6, 2010, Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania) was a prominent American economist, the principal founder of the discipline of Regional Science, as well as one of the main founders of the discipline of Peace Science and Peace Economics.

Born on April 19, 1919 in Philadelphia, Isard graduated with honors at the age of 20 from Temple University. He next went to Harvard University, studying under Alvin Hansen and Abbott Usher, who stimulated his interest in location theory. Isard left Harvard in 1941 without taking a degree, moving instead to the University of Chicago, where he studied under Frank H. Knight, Oscar Lange, and Jacob Viner. In 1942, Isard obtained a position with the National Resources Planning Board, in Washington, D.C., while completing his dissertation on building cycles and transportation development. A Quaker, he obtained conscientious objector status during the war, and en lieu of military service he served as an orderly in a state mental hospital. It was during this period that he translated into English the works of some of the principal German location theorists. Now focusing primarily on location issues, Isard obtained a part-time teaching position at Harvard in 1945, and did some work on the location of the U.S. steel industry, as well as some work on the costs and benefits of atomic power.

At Harvard, Isard became well acquainted with Wassily Leontief and helped him adapt his idea of an input-output model to a local economy. Between 1949 and 1953 Isard was employed as a research associate at Harvard, but teaching a course, designed by himself, on location theory and regional development. Through this course, and through discussions with other economists, Isard managed to attract many other scholars to these fields. Already by 1948 the American Economic Association was organizing sessions on regional development at its annual conference. At the 1950 American Economic Association meeting, Isard met with 26 other like-minded economists and came up with a clearer idea of what the newly emerging field of regional science should look like: it would be interdisciplinary, and it required some novel concepts, data, and techniques. As part of the effort to develop regional science Isard found himself at the center of a network of scholars from economics, city planning, political science, sociology, and geography.

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