Throughout this book, we see economic modelers distancing themselves from any explanatory power or realist intentions of their artifacts. Chapter 5 takes a closer look at such utterings as a specific kind of model talk that accompanied modeling as a practice. Frequently, such talk related to the power of mathematics as a language, centering on the greater “virility” of transparent and unambiguous mathematical methods compared to their verbal counterparts and predecessors. In contrast, I focus on instances in which economists grappled with their tricky artifacts and their messy practices. The talk surrounding Solow’s model turned it into a didactic device, a prototype for larger-scale planning models, an imagery of a world that macroeconomic management was capable of creating, and a part of a toolbox that equipped economists as “little thinkers” with technically sound and rationally appropriate knowledge. While model talk in the first place emphasized the epistemic and political tentativeness of models, Solow’s model turned into the epitome of what graduates called the “MIT style of modeling.”

McNamara’s appreciation of the military problems in Vietnam was intimately connected to economic developments in Washington. A continued balance of payments deficit and an unsettled domestic economic picture heightened the administration’s sense of vulnerability. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) exerted new pressure on the Military Assistance Program (MAP) that funded operations in Vietnam. With Dillon, McNamara worked on a Cabinet Committee on the Balance of Payments that recommended significant troop redeployments around the world. The JCS and State Department stymied their efforts. In this context, McNamara met with the famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who was especially critical of the growing commitment in Vietnam. McNamara chose a counterinsurgency strategy in Vietnam because it was cheaper as it relied on local forces. As Galbraith and others recommended, McNamara moved to downgrade the relative importance of South Vietnam to US security and to emphasize that the conflict was an internal insurgency. He used the pressures on the MAP to accelerate the phaseout of the US presence in South Vietnam.