Doctoral Dissertation Research: Inventing the Notion of the Economy

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

Introduction Before 1930, economists theorized and measured markets, trade, inequality, and more, but did not bundle these objects together into a unified whole named "the economy." This dissertation investigates why the economy emerged in the 1930s and why it took the particular shape it did. Using archival research and computational techniques for analyzing text, it argues that the production of official, routine, timely macroeconomic statistics transformed the fuzzy conceptual space of economic life into a concrete, bounded object, "the economy" in the 1930s and 1940s. The standardization and diffusion of national income statistics in the 1950s and 1960s globalized "the economy," such that by 1970 every country was understood to have an economy. Since these economies were all measured the same way, their size could then be easily compared to make claims about development and growth. National income statistics focused attention on economic growth, and away from income and wealth inequality, which contributed to academics and policymakers overlooking increasing inequality even as interest in poverty grew. Intellectual Merit Scholars have long argued that scientific practices construct objects, but most work in this tradition focuses on the natural sciences and medicine. Unlike the natural sciences, social sciences often build their objects with administrative data, and thus the information available is already interpreted and categorized. This investigation of how economists constructed "the economy" should provide broader insight into the process of how social sciences shape the world. Broader Impacts Why should every dollar count the same, whether it is spent on treating illness, cleaning up pollution or building bombs? This dissertation explores how the US settled on one particular answer to that question, and why scholars and others are still arguing about it. Behind debates over the proper measurement of Gross Domestic Product are ethical questions about what is to be valued and fundamental questions about the nature of the economy itself.