Suchergebnisse

Abstract
The introductory essay to the HOPE supplement on "economics as news" argues why journalism is a deserving subject for research in the history of economics. The case rests on three claims. The first is that the study of journalism gives us a view of a distinct epistemological tradition, of news epistemology, that unsettles the standard convictions of academic knowledge ways. Second, the practices of news organizations are key to understanding how these organizations transform contemporary life into news, marketable products of predictable format. The implication is that economics is featured in news when it is aligned with preexisting journalism practices. Third, journalists acknowledge the existence of domains of expertise but do not feel accountable to them. Ideas that economists may think of as their own are appropriated, repurposed, reinterpreted, and then again and again. Taken together, these arguments describe journalism as an exciting new research territory that will help us understand why so often the body of public economic knowledge diverges from the convictions of credentialed economists.

Abstract
John D. McDonald was a writer and editor best known for his work at Fortune magazine in the 1950s and 1960s and as the ghostwriter of the memoirs of Alfred P. Sloan. McDonald was also the first person to popularize game theory. In this article I argue that game theory played a key role in McDonald's transition from documentary writer to business journalist. Game theory gave McDonald a journalistic device to discover business stories and to give those stories a driving tension; he called it a "story engine." After decades writing with game theory, it began to serve a different purpose for McDonald. By coding business stories as games, McDonald gained insight into the characters, corporate executives who were often brief in explanations and shallow in self-understanding. McDonald's career gives us a glimpse at an extraordinary transformation of how a set of scholarly ideas can become a literary resource for vividness (of stories) and depth (of characters).

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.

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.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the social science associations (anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, and history) were faced by a string of academic freedom controversies. I review debates at association meetings and the reports and policy statements of committees on ethics and political discrimination. The ethics committees dealt with the involvement of association members with nonuniversity patrons, in the wake of revelations about Project Camelot. The committees on political discrimination examined allegations that university administrations were discriminating against radical scholars for their advocacy against the war in Vietnam and other revolutionary causes of the time. I argue that in both instances social scientists sought to accommodate the new roles of universities in American society by developing codes of conduct for social scientists that were voluntary and nonenforceable. Implied in the response of social science associations was that threats to academic freedom arose in social scientists' misguided behavior and not by fault of the new institutional setting of the university in the 1960s.

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 brought dispersed critique into an organized and self-conscious grouping, self-identified as Post Keynesian economics. The broad question addressed is how did the Post Keynesians construct their identity?