Cultures of Expertise and the Public Interventions of Economists

Mata, Tiago; Medema, Steven G.

doi:10.1215/00182702-2310926

Cited by 21 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…The greatly extended role of the state in capital accumulation and the reproduction of capitalist relations of production was accompanied by the absorption of bourgeois and proletarian public spheres, both of which relied very much on personal exchanges, into national public spheres in which different views were articulated through mass media, while class-organizations, notably unions and employers' associations were drawn into state-mediated corporatism. Following the precedent Keynes had set, economists became acclaimed public intellectuals (Godden, 2013;Mata, Medema, 2013).…”

Section: Liberalism Socialist Challenges and Capitalist Responsesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Economic ideas, capital logic and class struggle: reflections towards a people’s history of economics

Schmidt¹

2022

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This article outlines ideas about a people’s history of economics. The goal of such a history is to use economic theory to understand the formation of classes, political projects and historical blocs and history as a history of class struggles instead of the unfolding of economic laws. The article discusses the shortcomings of existing histories of economic thought and peoples’ histories. It suggests a synthesis that offers insights into the production and diffusion of economic ideas and their role in the making and remaking of class- and state relations from industrial capitalism to the present. The last part of the article offers an outline organized around the ideas of Smith, Marx, the Marginalists, Keynes and Hayek. Though using the common big names as entry points to class- and state-formation during different periods of capitalist and imperialist development, the peoples’ history is mainly concerned with the lives, thoughts and struggles of the toiling, primarily invisible, hands performing paid and unpaid work in capitalist centres and peripheries.

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Section: Liberalism Socialist Challenges and Capitalist Responsesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Economic ideas, capital logic and class struggle: reflections towards a people’s history of economics

Schmidt¹

2022

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“…We need look no farther than terms such as “invisible hand,” “Keynesian revolution,” and “Coase theorem” to see the very interesting interface—and it is an interface, not a path—between economist and audience. As historians of economics increasingly turn their attention to this interface (e.g., Mata and Medema 2013), our understanding of the history of economics becomes deeper and richer, as it has through Barber’s scholarship.…”

Section: Investigating the Economist As Policy Advisormentioning

confidence: 99%

The Economist and the Economist’s Audience

Medema

2019

J Hist Econ Thought

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The history of economics, properly read, is very much a history of economics in the public sphere. Sir William Petty developed his most important insights in the process of providing advice on taxation to the monarch. Adam Smith wrote with a view to influencing the habits of thought of both the educated layman and policy makers. Jane Marcet and Harriet Martineau brought early classical political economy to the masses. David Ricardo formulated foundational elements of the nineteenth-century classical system writing policy pamphlets and then entered Parliament with a view to putting policy making on a solid economic footing. Karl Marx’s intended audience was anything but the practitioners of the emerging science of political economy. Alfred Marshall buried his technical analysis in appendices to maximize the exposure of his work. John Maynard Keynes’s influence can be ascribed, without too much injustice, as much to his effectiveness outside the walls of Cambridge as within them and to the use by others of his ideas in that same public realm. Yet, despite this lengthy history of economists’ engagements with various publics, including those pulling the levers of policy, those writing on the history of economics have focused far more intently on the history of theory and the implications for the construction of a body of thought known as “economic analysis” than on the interplay among economists, economic ideas, and the public realm. It is as if the economic conversation went on solely within the space of academic departments of economics, even though those spaces are very recent creations.

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“…One explanation to the historiographical break c. 1950 might be postwar's cosmopolitanism. But if that explanation is too remote or faint, a more proximate one is that in the 1950s as the economics discipline gained eminence in policy analysis and newsworthiness (Mata and Medema 2013) that visibility changed the readers and stakes of the histories. It is then that we enter our era -a time when journalists, intellectuals, and scholars from all disciplines are readers and writers in the history of economics (for a recent survey of the latter see Fontaine 2016).…”

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confidence: 99%