"Arise ye prisoners of taxation”, the work of the imagination in the media writings of economists Tiago Mata Department of Science and Technology Studies University College London 22 Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT United Kingdom Email:
[email protected] Acknowledgments: I thank Claire Lemercier for introducing me to text analysis and setting me on the course of writing this essay. Andrea Salter provided invaluable assistance in preparation of the corpus. Versions of this paper were presented to the Public Understanding of Science Seminar in London, History of Economics as History of Culture workshop at University of Paris-Cergy, and at the annual meetings of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought, I thank the participants at those events for their helpful suggestions. I am specially thankful to Harro Maas, Roger Backhouse and Beatrice Cherrier for their detailed comments and suggestions. Funding The research was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) for a project entitled “Economics in the Public Sphere,” grant agreement n. 283754. Abstract Since the 1960s a small number of academic economists has enjoyed celebrity status in the US media. Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman were exemplar specimens of the kind. From 1966 to 1984 they were columnists at Newsweek. Samuelson and Friedman became newsworthy by forecasting the outcomes of competing policy programs and imagining a horizon of prosperity. Faced by the social upheavals and the stagflation of the 1970s their writing turned from prediction and advice to indictments of government failure. During the tax revolts Tiago Mata 1 of 1976-78 Friedman claimed membership to an imagined community of taxpayers reclaiming their wealth from the state.