How to train the next generation of historians of economics? The apprentice historian has in 2018... more How to train the next generation of historians of economics? The apprentice historian has in 2018 a wealth of resources to exploit. If she wants to get a head start on the themes and problems that might grip the field in 20 years, she might leaf through the yearly supplements of History of Political Economy. If she needs to get acquainted with the canon of economics, she might travel to summer schools coast to coast, Italy to North America, offering initiation into the interpretative arts. She might then join scholarly networks, of senior, junior, or mixed membership, and invite the critical exam of her peers on work in progress. The historian-in-training of today can scan the horizons of the discipline, be socialized in collective reading, and shape community.
In this essay, I argue that radical economics innovated in the communication of economic ideas, e... more In this essay, I argue that radical economics innovated in the communication of economic ideas, engendering new idioms and print formats to intervene in circuits of progressive activism. The essay mentions the pamphlet work of the Union for Radical Political Economics’ various public engagement projects of the early 1970s but at its heart is the 1974 founding of the mass distribution monthly Dollars & Sense. It looks at the positions taken by the periodical over the years and asks, “What kind of print object was it?” It places the publication within a twentieth century history of left political economy periodicals and compares it with its closest contemporaries in the cultures of print of the American Left, notably Monthly Review and Radical America. The attention to the print ventures of radical economics in the 1970s is a contribution to a new kind of historiography that takes an expanded and extra-curricular outlook of economics.
The 1930s transformed American capitalism. This article interrogates the political economy of two... more The 1930s transformed American capitalism. This article interrogates the political economy of two business magazines created at the start of the Great Depression. I argue thatBusiness Week’s andFortune’s signature approaches to reporting articulated an ideal conception of the manager. The early century conception saw the manager as engineer of operational efficiency. The new ideal viewed the manager as a political economist coordinating firms with their external environment, notably an interventionist and scrutinizing state, volatile markets, and a critical public opinion.
ArgumentIn the late 1960s, in the midst of campus unrest, a group of young economists calling the... more ArgumentIn the late 1960s, in the midst of campus unrest, a group of young economists calling themselves “radicals” challenged the boundaries of economics. In the radicals' cultural cartography, economic science and politics were represented as overlapping. These claims were scandalous because they were voiced from Harvard University, drawing on its authority. With radicals' claims the subject of increasing media attention, the economics mainstream sought to re-assert the longstanding cultural map of economic science, where objectivity and advocacy were distinguishable. The resolution of the contest of credibility came with a string of cases of dismissals and denial of tenure for radicals. The American Economic Association's investigations of these cases, imposing the conventional cultural map, concluded that personnel decisions had not been politically motivated. Radicals were forced to migrate from the elite institutions from which they had emerged to less prestigious ...
Research in the social sciences received generous patronage in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Re... more Research in the social sciences received generous patronage in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Research was widely perceived as providing solutions to emerging social problems. That generosity came under increased contest in the late 1970s. Although these trends held true for all of the social sciences, this essay explores the various ways by which economists in particular reacted to and resisted the patronage cuts that were proposed in the first budgets of the Reagan administration. Economists' response was three fold: to engage in joint lobbying with other social scientists, to tap into their authority as a respected policy player, and to influence the types of research financed by the patron. With interviews of the former lobbyist for the social scientists, the former director of the Economics program for the National Science Foundation, and a review of the archival records of economists and their scholarly society, we discuss how economists have claimed entitlement to patronage in the closing decades of the twentieth century. We observe a dynamic and productive relationship between politicians and researchers mediated by the National Science Foundation, where civil servants, lobbyist and public minded scientists, and self-serving grantees trade roles.
Economics in the 1960s was host to a number of dissenting movements challenging the profession... more Economics in the 1960s was host to a number of dissenting movements challenging the profession's mainstream theories. As this mainstream changed in the 1970s, the dissenters also underwent a transformation of their own. By the late 1970s the dispersed dissenting voices had congregated to form groups of neo-Austrians, post-Keynesians, neo-Marxists and radical economists. Retrospectively, the 1970s appear as a period of intense negotiation among dissenters as they erected theoretical and methodological boundaries and institutions (associations, journals, seminars) that would come to define them. They were constructing not just conditions for carrying on their work but also a narrative perception of who they were, what they stood for and what was the nature of the profession they inhabited, which I hereafter call “identity” or “self-image.” The dispersed critiques were being redrawn into new sociological unities inside the profession. This paper aims to track one of the routes that...
Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences, 2011
2. Akin to the present essay, Wayne Parsons (1989) examines the content of economic opinion in th... more 2. Akin to the present essay, Wayne Parsons (1989) examines the content of economic opinion in the financial press. His focus rests on the 1970s and the U.K., and changes to the doctrinal content of op-eds following their impact on the programs of the Labour and Conservative parties. In contrast, this essay looks at a wider range of materials in the U.S.: editorials, but also reporting, commentaries, and books coming out of magazine writing. On the subject of influence, I rely on the above-cited literature as a record of the ebb and flow of economics' authority in the American polity. 3. The coverage of economic and business news in the major newspapers before 1970 was not extensive. Newspapers created business sections and extended their economic coverage to match the extraordinary success of the Wall Street Journal in the 1960s (Gussow, 1984). B. C. Forbes. In September 1929, McGraw-Hill, Inc., the largest U.S. publisher of trade journals, began publishing The Business Week. In mid-October, Time, Inc. announced it was preparing a monthly, sold from February 1930 and titled Fortune. Both Fortune and Business Week were conceived in the prosperous 1920s and their original prospectus was to herald the achievements of the era. A month had passed since Business Week's first issue and a week from Time Inc.'s announcement when the greatest business story of the twentieth century broke. The New York Stock Exchange crash on "Black Tuesday" ushered in the Great Depression. The Depression and the New Deal brought hard times for the magazines, but they survived, albeit with limited growth and earnings (Burlingame, 1959, pp. 258-276; Elson, 1968, pp. 133-152). The glorious era for business magazines came after the Second World War. Both Fortune and Business Week purposefully turned to the interests of businessmen in a new age of prosperity and apologia of private enterprise. Their success can be gauged by increasing circulation and profits. Selling at a high cover price and bulky at 300 pages per issue, Fortune expanded its circulation from 130,000 in 1939 to 325,000 by 1959. Forbes tripled its subscriptions between 1954 and 1965, reaching 410,000. But the dominant publication was Business Week. It was not sold in the stands but was marketed directly to companies and executives. Business Week had the largest advertising revenues and from 1950 to 1967 rose from 200,000 subscribers to 550,000. It is this remarkable affirmation of business journalism that deserves attention. 4 Contributing to the magazines' success was their coverage and use of social science. As I read the magazines' reporting on economics, 5 most of my evidence will come from Business Week (henceforth BW), the only weekly and the publication with the largest circulation. I will argue that the economic reporting of BW was strongly influenced by Leonard S. Silk. From 1954 to 1969, Silk was a journalist and editor at the magazine and a recognized pioneer of economics as news. 6 Silk's writing illustrates the styles and themes that characterized postwar media's representation of economics. My thesis is that economists were represented as trustworthy through the attribution of identities. In the immediate postwar period, economists were under suspicion as enemies of free enterprise and doomsayers of capitalism. The new Keynesian doctrine that was sweeping the profession was in many quarters equated with New Dealism, or worse with socialism. 7 Progressively, the media began to emphasize economists' skills at calculation and measurement, to become technicians of planning, as forecasters. The next transformation in economics' public image 360 TIAGO MATA
Measuring America: How Economic Growth Came to Define American Greatness in the Late Twentieth Century
History of Political Economy, 2012
focus on the economic person during efforts toward greater socioeconomic balance. Undeniably, eac... more focus on the economic person during efforts toward greater socioeconomic balance. Undeniably, each literary contribution addresses a significant component of the social equity debate. It is left to be seen, however, whether these considerations will take the forefront in legislative motions for wealth creation, wealth sharing, and increased opportunities for individual economic advancement. At the level of theory, the importance of individual preferences, choices, and values is crucial for an understanding of the effects of individual actions. The extent to which it is, and can be, incorporated into wider socioeconomic planning processes is questionable though. It may be more economical for governments to generalize when determining what is in the greater public interest, instead of focusing on the minutiae behind the rationale governing human behaviors. This perspective lends itself to the interpretation of author contributions on personalist economics. The foundational thinking for this branch of economic thought is noble and unreservedly selfless, but unfortunately, it bears semblance to the unrealistic, as it has not traversed the boundary between theory and real-world socioeconomics. The suggested need for greater government involvement through workable public policy mechanisms and human capital investment is a positive step that augurs well for increased social equity and greater social well-being. Whether governments are prepared to assume a more proactive role in this respect, however, is determined not just by social wants, but also by the workings of globalization. Social economics, as evidenced by the publications reviewed, has come a long way, and will continue to add important elements to the wider debate on what is required to sustain social well-being in the long term.
The essays in this volume examine the economist as public intellectual. Rather than assessing the... more The essays in this volume examine the economist as public intellectual. Rather than assessing the changing status of the public intellectual in culture or attempting to define the identity of the public intellectual, our approach is to study the public interventions of economists, that is, the encounters between economists and their publics. In the volume we constrain ourselves to the long twentieth century in the United States and the United Kingdom, fenced at one end by the Progressive Era and Fabianism and the ongoing economic crisis at the other. Economists then and now have been occupants of the public sphere, and to understand their encounters with the public we must appreciate the expectations they bring to the meeting and the institutional contexts that enable the encounters. The unifying claim of our collection is that economists’ public interventions have been of profound consequence for both the structure and the content of the public sphere.
Gilles Dostaler, Keynes and his Battles, Cheltenham (uk), Edward Elgar, pp. vi+374, 2007 [an augmented and revised edition of Keynes et ses combats, Paris, Albin Michel, 2005, transl. by Niall B. Mann]
Roger E. Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine (eds), The History of the Social Sciences since 1945, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 256
Including a Symposium on Mary Morgan: Curiosity, Imagination, and Surprise, 2018
In my years as a student of Mary Morgan and later as her junior peer, I observed that one concept... more In my years as a student of Mary Morgan and later as her junior peer, I observed that one concept prompted her to react with caution and skepticism. That common notion was “influence.” In this chapter, I follow her cues to ask what are the legitimate grounds for claims of influence in historical explanation. Morgan’s writings have made us aware that the story of social science cannot be captured in simple reckonings of influence, and that long chains of actions are required to seat an idea in the mind, and longer still to set it to paper. My contribution to problematizing influence is to list the pitfalls of its uncritical use but also, once suitably redefined, its potential contribution to analysis. To illustrate my claims, I propose a test case, to study the “influence of Mary Morgan.”
Since the middle years of the 1960s there has been within American economics a vibrant (and numer... more Since the middle years of the 1960s there has been within American economics a vibrant (and numerous) community of scholars who self-identify as radicals. "Radical" was a term dear to the New Left, a movement animated by University-based intellectuals that campaigned on such issues as civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam war. "Radical" had for them a double meaning. It signified boldness in demanding a major departure from the prevailing social order and a commitment to "get to the root" of power relations (an allusion to the etymology of the term). Fifty years ago that radical vocation found an institutional embodiment in a Union for Radical Political Economics (henceforth URPE) first assembled at Ann Arbor, Michigan, in September 1968. This collection appears at the pretext of that half-century landmark. This collection is however not narrowly about URPE. While the circumstances of the Union's founding are well-documented and understood (see for instance Wachtel 2008 and Mata 2009), historical and sociological study of the values, practices and careers of radical economists is sparse. When radicals earn a mention in the historical literature often times it is as ancillary to a debate about the architecture of contemporary economics, notably the secular persistence of a mainstream, a tightly knit, like-minded elite, that is beset by a motley crew of dissenters with their alternative methodologies. In this literature, attention to radical economics is subsidiary to the task of unraveling the fundamental antinomy between orthodoxy
Review of “Recharting the History of Economic Thought” edited by Kevin Deane and Elisa Van Waeyen... more Review of “Recharting the History of Economic Thought” edited by Kevin Deane and Elisa Van Waeyenberge
The agencies of the government of the United States of America, such as the Food and Drug Adminis... more The agencies of the government of the United States of America, such as the Food and Drug Administration or the Environmental Protection Agency, intervene in American society through the collection, processing, and diffusion of information. The Presidency of Barack Obama was notable for updating and redesigning the US government’s information infrastructure. The White House enhanced mass consultation through open government and big data initiatives to evaluate policy effectiveness, and it launched new ways of communicating with the citizenry. In this essay we argue that these programs spelled out an emergent epistemology based on two assumptions: dispersed knowledge and a critique of judgment. These programs have redefined the evidence required to justify and design regulatory policy and conferred authority to a new kind of expert, which we call epistemic consultants.
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