Pub Date : 2023-08-17DOI: 10.1215/00182702-10875031
T. Mata
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).
{"title":"Economics as “a Story Engine”: John D. McDonald and Business as Game and Gamble","authors":"T. Mata","doi":"10.1215/00182702-10875031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-10875031","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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).","PeriodicalId":47043,"journal":{"name":"History of Political Economy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46916692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-17DOI: 10.1215/00182702-10875016
P. C. Milazzo
Previous scholars have described the American business journalist Henry Hazlitt as “an intellectual middleman for orthodox economics.” This article examines Hazlitt's career during the immediate post–World War II era to flesh out how he performed this intermediary role in a specific historical context. A spotlight on unbound print media demonstrates how they enabled Hazlitt to transmit his ideas about the postwar political economy beyond traditional mainstream venues, extending and animating the reading public. Hazlitt's engagement with pamphlet literature likewise inspired a collaboration with Leonard Read that helped lay the groundwork for the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), the first postwar libertarian think tank. Hazlitt and FEE embarked on a reciprocal relationship during the organization's early years: FEE raised Hazlitt's profile by publicizing and disseminating his influential books Economics in One Lesson (1946) and Will Dollars Save the World? (1947) in pamphlet form, while the organization sought to build its brand by linking itself to the journalist's mainstream credibility. Examining Hazlitt's pamphlet trail in this way reaffirms his popular reach; underscores his unique role as an intellectual, interpersonal, and institutional go-between; and makes a case for his inclusion alongside other key figures in the historiography of the twentieth-century American Right.
{"title":"Henry Hazlitt Unbound: Pamphlets, Markets, and Economic Education after World War II","authors":"P. C. Milazzo","doi":"10.1215/00182702-10875016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-10875016","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Previous scholars have described the American business journalist Henry Hazlitt as “an intellectual middleman for orthodox economics.” This article examines Hazlitt's career during the immediate post–World War II era to flesh out how he performed this intermediary role in a specific historical context. A spotlight on unbound print media demonstrates how they enabled Hazlitt to transmit his ideas about the postwar political economy beyond traditional mainstream venues, extending and animating the reading public. Hazlitt's engagement with pamphlet literature likewise inspired a collaboration with Leonard Read that helped lay the groundwork for the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), the first postwar libertarian think tank. Hazlitt and FEE embarked on a reciprocal relationship during the organization's early years: FEE raised Hazlitt's profile by publicizing and disseminating his influential books Economics in One Lesson (1946) and Will Dollars Save the World? (1947) in pamphlet form, while the organization sought to build its brand by linking itself to the journalist's mainstream credibility. Examining Hazlitt's pamphlet trail in this way reaffirms his popular reach; underscores his unique role as an intellectual, interpersonal, and institutional go-between; and makes a case for his inclusion alongside other key figures in the historiography of the twentieth-century American Right.","PeriodicalId":47043,"journal":{"name":"History of Political Economy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44423051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-17DOI: 10.1215/00182702-10875059
Peter Coy
{"title":"Writing about Economics","authors":"Peter Coy","doi":"10.1215/00182702-10875059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-10875059","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47043,"journal":{"name":"History of Political Economy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43240864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-17DOI: 10.1215/00182702-10875002
E. Forget
This article examines emerging concepts of objectivity in the work of Harriet Martineau and Henry Mayhew. It focuses on Martineau's How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838) and Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861), documenting how ideas about objectivity appeared in journalism and popular writing by these two prolific nineteenth-century social commentators.
{"title":"Untangling Concepts of Objectivity in Nineteenth-Century Social Reform: Harriet Martineau and Henry Mayhew Observe Urban Poverty","authors":"E. Forget","doi":"10.1215/00182702-10875002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-10875002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines emerging concepts of objectivity in the work of Harriet Martineau and Henry Mayhew. It focuses on Martineau's How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838) and Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861), documenting how ideas about objectivity appeared in journalism and popular writing by these two prolific nineteenth-century social commentators.","PeriodicalId":47043,"journal":{"name":"History of Political Economy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49271984","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-17DOI: 10.1215/00182702-10875143
Tomás Undurraga, M. Gárate
This article examines the debates surrounding Chile's economic model after the 2019 social uprising. It does so by studying how the leading columnists in the Chilean print media discussed the country's economic model between 2019 and 2021. The social uprising shook the political stability, social order, and economic certainty that had characterized the Chilean model for thirty years. Further, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic triggered a triple crisis—socioeconomic, political, and medical—that raised serious questions as to the market model's ability to guarantee social security. The analysis of the public debate shows how two landmarks of the Chilean model, namely, its legitimacy as a development path and the exclusive right of economists to discuss the economy, were subjected to questioning. The columnists' debate reflects a model in crisis that contrasts drastically with the optimistic narrative of Chile as a “model” country in Latin America. The 2019 social uprising also marked a critical shift in both the ways in which the economy is discussed and who is authorized to legitimately debate economic issues in the public sphere, thus constituting a break from the technocratic consensus regarding market-led policies. If the aftermath of the social uprising triggered the cultural decline of the Chilean model as a dispositive to justify market-oriented policies, the way in which the economy is publicly discussed also changed radically.
{"title":"The Cultural Decline of the Chilean Model: The Aftermath of the 2019 Social Uprising","authors":"Tomás Undurraga, M. Gárate","doi":"10.1215/00182702-10875143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-10875143","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines the debates surrounding Chile's economic model after the 2019 social uprising. It does so by studying how the leading columnists in the Chilean print media discussed the country's economic model between 2019 and 2021. The social uprising shook the political stability, social order, and economic certainty that had characterized the Chilean model for thirty years. Further, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic triggered a triple crisis—socioeconomic, political, and medical—that raised serious questions as to the market model's ability to guarantee social security. The analysis of the public debate shows how two landmarks of the Chilean model, namely, its legitimacy as a development path and the exclusive right of economists to discuss the economy, were subjected to questioning. The columnists' debate reflects a model in crisis that contrasts drastically with the optimistic narrative of Chile as a “model” country in Latin America. The 2019 social uprising also marked a critical shift in both the ways in which the economy is discussed and who is authorized to legitimately debate economic issues in the public sphere, thus constituting a break from the technocratic consensus regarding market-led policies. If the aftermath of the social uprising triggered the cultural decline of the Chilean model as a dispositive to justify market-oriented policies, the way in which the economy is publicly discussed also changed radically.","PeriodicalId":47043,"journal":{"name":"History of Political Economy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48047489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-17DOI: 10.1215/00182702-10875101
Maria Grafström
In this article, I explore how economic information was turned into newsworthy content in Sweden during the 1960s and 1970s. Professional norms and identities of “business journalists” were during the 1960s yet to be developed, and there were concerns raised whether issues about the corporate world and the economy were suitable to turn into journalistic news content at all. Conceptualizing newsworthiness as a logic of appropriateness, the analysis focuses on the roles that professional norms and identities played in forming nascent economic news practice. The empirical findings show that there was not one way—or one place—that this newsworthiness was constructed. Instead, nascent economic news was produced in two highly separated organizational settings: one rooted in the journalistic world and one in the business world. Depending on the context, significantly different methods and ideas guided the nascent work of creating newsworthiness for economic information.
{"title":"Crafting Newsworthiness in the Intersection of “Business” and “Journalism”: The Role of Context and Identity in Nascent Economic News Practice in Sweden","authors":"Maria Grafström","doi":"10.1215/00182702-10875101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-10875101","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this article, I explore how economic information was turned into newsworthy content in Sweden during the 1960s and 1970s. Professional norms and identities of “business journalists” were during the 1960s yet to be developed, and there were concerns raised whether issues about the corporate world and the economy were suitable to turn into journalistic news content at all. Conceptualizing newsworthiness as a logic of appropriateness, the analysis focuses on the roles that professional norms and identities played in forming nascent economic news practice. The empirical findings show that there was not one way—or one place—that this newsworthiness was constructed. Instead, nascent economic news was produced in two highly separated organizational settings: one rooted in the journalistic world and one in the business world. Depending on the context, significantly different methods and ideas guided the nascent work of creating newsworthiness for economic information.","PeriodicalId":47043,"journal":{"name":"History of Political Economy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45967668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-17DOI: 10.1215/00182702-10874988
C. Wennerlind
The South Sea Bubble is one of history's most iconic economic events. While much ink was spilled during the bubble year to make sense of events as they unfolded, commentators were left scrambling for ways to grasp what happened because no one had ever experienced a stock market bubble before. This article focuses on how the London press covered the events that later became known as the South Sea Bubble. A review of every newspaper article in which the company was mentioned during the year of 1720 captures how the movement of the price of the company's stock was interpreted, as well as how it was related to broader social, political, and geopolitical affairs.
{"title":"“The British Lions Crouched to a Nest of Owls”: The South Sea Bubble through the Lens of the London Press","authors":"C. Wennerlind","doi":"10.1215/00182702-10874988","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-10874988","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The South Sea Bubble is one of history's most iconic economic events. While much ink was spilled during the bubble year to make sense of events as they unfolded, commentators were left scrambling for ways to grasp what happened because no one had ever experienced a stock market bubble before. This article focuses on how the London press covered the events that later became known as the South Sea Bubble. A review of every newspaper article in which the company was mentioned during the year of 1720 captures how the movement of the price of the company's stock was interpreted, as well as how it was related to broader social, political, and geopolitical affairs.","PeriodicalId":47043,"journal":{"name":"History of Political Economy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65984846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-17DOI: 10.1215/00182702-10875129
Roei Davidson
This article analyzes Money, Explained, a five-episode video series produced by the American explanatory journalism organization Vox and distributed globally by Netflix, as an exemplar of the recent proliferation of digital media content explaining economic issues to a general public. Such content reflects the increased prominence of news-about-relations in economic news coverage, a news form that aims to explain why current trends and events occur while also echoing early twentieth-century corporate pedagogic films and more recent personal finance journalism that instructs audiences on proper capitalist behavior. The Vox series considers several financial topics all centered on economic problems that individuals experience, involving get-rich-quick schemes, gambling, retirement saving, credit cards, and student loans. It focuses on individuals' psychological flaws as a cause for the problems they encounter and suggests that viewers can change their disposition and modify their individual behavior to surmount these problems. The series identifies some aspects of the economic system as unfair but does not consider the capacity of individuals to act collectively to restructure it.
{"title":"Flawed Players in a Complex Game: Popular Audiovisual Explanations of Economics in the United States","authors":"Roei Davidson","doi":"10.1215/00182702-10875129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-10875129","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article analyzes Money, Explained, a five-episode video series produced by the American explanatory journalism organization Vox and distributed globally by Netflix, as an exemplar of the recent proliferation of digital media content explaining economic issues to a general public. Such content reflects the increased prominence of news-about-relations in economic news coverage, a news form that aims to explain why current trends and events occur while also echoing early twentieth-century corporate pedagogic films and more recent personal finance journalism that instructs audiences on proper capitalist behavior. The Vox series considers several financial topics all centered on economic problems that individuals experience, involving get-rich-quick schemes, gambling, retirement saving, credit cards, and student loans. It focuses on individuals' psychological flaws as a cause for the problems they encounter and suggests that viewers can change their disposition and modify their individual behavior to surmount these problems. The series identifies some aspects of the economic system as unfair but does not consider the capacity of individuals to act collectively to restructure it.","PeriodicalId":47043,"journal":{"name":"History of Political Economy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46529055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-17DOI: 10.1215/00182702-10875087
David Warsh
{"title":"Writing about Economics","authors":"David Warsh","doi":"10.1215/00182702-10875087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-10875087","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47043,"journal":{"name":"History of Political Economy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46681675","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-17DOI: 10.1215/00182702-10874974
T. Mata
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.
{"title":"Introducing Journalism into the History of Economics","authors":"T. Mata","doi":"10.1215/00182702-10874974","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-10874974","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":47043,"journal":{"name":"History of Political Economy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44611468","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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