[1][2][3]: vii  When he established the Cowles Commission in 1932, he was intent on making economics more of a "science" by collecting data and applying modern mathematical and statistical techniques.

[1] His mother, Elizabeth Cheney Cowles, died of lung disease in 1898, leaving Bob and his three younger brothers to be raised by their father.

[3][6] Cowles became the principal in his own investment company in Colorado Springs, but withdrew from the financial markets prior to the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

[8] He began a project to analyze the effectiveness of investment advisory newsletters, to determine how they compared to actual stock market performance.

[3] : 191  Dutch biochemist Charles H. Boissevain, his friend and head of the Colorado Foundation for Research in Tuberculosis, advised him that multiple-correlation analysis could be applied to economic research, and recommended that he speak to Harold T. Davis, a mathematician at Indiana University who spent his summers in Colorado Springs and a member of the fledgling Econometric Society.

[9] When it turned out that the machines were ill-suited to the task, Cowles decided to perform a series of linear regressions to test the hypothesis that market analysts using current estimation techniques could not outperform random guessing.

[6] Encouraged by Davis, Cowles wrote to Yale economist Irving Fisher to offer funding for the Econometric Society and to underwrite a new academic journal, Econometrica, in return for Fisher's assistance in assembling a "brain trust" of leading scholars to work with the Cowles Commission.

[9][8][3]: 193  In addition to Harold T. Davis, methodological guidance in the early years was provided by actuarial mathematician James Glover of University of Michigan and Thornton Fry of Bell Laboratories.