A trajetória de tobias de lacerda martins moscoso entre a escola politécnica e a econometric society: Uma história inacabada

Abstract

Tobias de Lacerda Martins Moscoso (1879-1928) was a Brazilian engineer who worked on statistics, mathematics, and political economy. Despite his professorship at the Polytechnic School of the University of Rio de Janeiro, Moscoso had his name overshadowed in the Brazilian historiography by the air crash that killed him, in 1928. Notwithstanding his premature death, Moscoso was, in 1930, the only Latin American among the addressees of the invitation letter sent by Fisher, Frisch, and Roos to the founding meeting of the Econometric Society. This paper, therefore, aims at fulfilling two objectives: Recovering Tobias Moscoso’s name in the Brazilian historiography and presenting the trajectory that made him one of the individuals among the eighty-three invitees for the foundation of the Econometric Society. The paper argues that the invitation Moscoso received was based on two pillars: His approach to political economy, which favored quantitative methods, and his visit to the Parisian academic circles, in 1926.