Walter Isard April 19, 1919 – November 6, 2010 was the prominent American economist, a principal founder of the discipline of regional science, as living as one of the leading founders of the discipline of peace studies & Peace economics.
Born on April 19, 1919 in 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 utility he served as an orderly in a state mental hospital. It was during this period that he translated into English the workings 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 shit on the location of the U.S. steel industry, as living as some pull in on the costs and benefits of atomic power.
At Harvard, Isard became well acquainted with Wassily Leontief and helped him adapt his opinion 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, intentional by himself, on location theory and regional development. Through this course, and through discussions with other economists, Isard managed to attract numerous other scholars to these fields. Already by 1948 the American Economic Association was organizing sessions on regional developing 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 invited some novel concepts, data, and techniques. As part of the try to setting regional science Isard found himself at the center of a network of scholars from economics, city planning, political science, sociology, and geography.
In 1953 Isard moved to Regional Science Research Institute at Penn, and in 1958 the new field's flagship journal, the Journal of Regional Science. In 1960 Isard worked to spread regional science to Europe, and in 1962 he helped mark up regional science associations for Latin America and East Asia.
In 1963 Isard assembled a chain of scholars in Malmö, Sweden, for the aim of establishing the Peace Research Society. In 1973, this combine became the Peace Science Society. Like regional science, peace science was viewed as an interdisciplinary and international attempt to establishment a special kind of concepts, techniques and data. In 1977 Isard stepped down as chair of the department of regional science at Penn in profile to devote more time to peace science, and moved to Cornell University in 1979. In 1985, Isard was elected a portion of the Economic Sciences section of the National Academy of Sciences.
Isard died in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania.