"Arise Ye Prisoners of Taxation”, the Work of the Imagination in the Media Writings of Economists

"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. The study of the Newsweek columns shows the work of the imagination in the public interventions of economists, and that celebrity economists have preserved the privilege of public attention by reimagining the polity and their place within it.

Keywords: sociology of economics; political economy; imaginaries; ontologies; journalism; tax revolt.

Tiago Mata 2

"Arise ye prisoners of taxation”, the work of the imagination in the media writings of economists

I am moved to paraphrase the call of the "Internationale": "Arise ye prisoners of taxation, you have nothing to lose but the IRS."" Milton Friedman, Newsweek, 1976

Inflation and taxes

On February 1974 the Consumer Price Index of the United States reached 10%. The news was experienced with alarm, as it was the first time since 1947 that the country experienced double digit inflation in peacetime (Dale, 1974). For nearly a decade, inflation had been a topic of media attention and electoral dispute. Its persistence, evading all attempts at control, is believed to have been a deciding factor in the break up of the Keynesian postwar consensus and in ushering a conservative revival in policy and in academia.1 To tie doctrinal change to policy failure is instantly plausible but simplifies and distracts us from changes in contemporary popular understandings of economic life. Inflation impelled social movements of the poor and of the rich to voice new understandings of political economy that fell outside the frame of policy discourse. The full cultural significance of inflation is grasped when we consider together elite and popular discourses. In this essay I look at the media as an interface of such discourses, in particular, I examine the media writings of prominent economists at a major newsmagazine to study changes in understandings of political economy. While looking to analyze how inflation transformed as a political cause, I am also interested in the observation that in the 1970s even as the advice of economists was shown repeatedly to be ineffective, they maintained a position of privilege in the public sphere. How might we account for economists’ triumph in adversity? I argue that economists managed public sentiment by reimagining

Tiago Mata 3 their place in the polity. Reading the Newsweek writings of Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson from 1966-1984, I identify how the two professors conceived their relationship with a vast and unknown public. They began their media careers by promising their readers access to the elite realm of policy making. They reproduced in public the advice they would give officials and they foresaw the consequences of policy initiatives such as changes to the minimum wage, the level of interest rates, the structure of the tax code, or welfare programs. Over time they retreated from this self presentation. Instead they reimagined themselves as critics of the state voicing popular grievances against its size and roles. The public in the first instance was a passive witness to economists’ policy briefings. It was later called to political action. In their role as critics of the state, economists’ claimed to uncover the interests that lay concealed in policy actions. Friedman in particular hammered the idea that inflation was “hidden taxation” in the service of bureaucrats and politicians, and an offence to the taxpaying citizenry. By studying the media writing of economists I show that the tax revolt of 1976-79 drew together popular and elite sentiment.2 A recent trend in economic sociology is to give economists an expanded role in the regulation and creation of markets and market behavior. Research by Donald MacKenzie, Michel Callon, their associates and students has led us to appreciate the “performative” function of economists’ financial models and formulas (MacKenzie, 2008; MacKenzie, Muniesa and Siu, 2007). The emphasis of this literature is on the “technologies” that economists produce and that produce calculative agents. Similarly, Gil Eyal, Larissa Buchholz (2010) and Timothy Mitchell (1998) have called us away from the study of the discourse of intellectuals to examine how the construction of statistics and other devices of economic representation reframe culture. Accounts of this kind are invaluable to understand how inflation became a salient concern in contemporary political life. Economists are implicated in the construction of the concept of “inflation” by inventing and maintaining statistical indexes that purport to measure aggregate price changes and by claiming that such figures can faithfully record changes to the standards of living (Breslau 1998, 2003; Desrosieres, 2008; Stapleford, 2009). However, to explain how inflation can animate political action and social

Tiago Mata 4 movements concerned with taxation, I contend that we need to draw on the concept of imaginaries (Arjun Appadurai, 1996; Jasanoff and Kim, 2015). I argue that economists do imaginative work so to make visible what is invisible. They make visible what lies in a distant future, prosperity or depression, or what is concealed by deliberating elites, such as a conspiracy to expropriate through inflation. To set the scene for my reading of the Newsweek writings of Samuelson and Friedman, in the following two sections I review the public status of economists and economics from the early 1960s to the 1980s. In this period American economists experienced extraordinary ascendancy in the public sphere, albeit tumultuously. From a self-confident discipline that promised to tie its scientific progress to greater social prosperity, economics retreated to become a discipline of critique of market and state failure. Samuelson and Friedman enjoyed at Newsweek exceptional discretion to ponder over these changes to their discipline and its rightful role in current affairs. I will show that the intellectual rivalry that animated the two men at the start of their media career transformed into a agonistic and ideological difference. But more important than the relationship between the professors, was their relationship with the public. At Newsweek the two columnists at times imagined their readers as witnesses to their counseling of political leaders and at other times they imagined themselves alongside their readers seeking political redress as part of a social movement.

Offering counsel

The public prominence of academic economists was greatly enhanced in the years of the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations. References to “economist(s)” doubled in the pages of The New York Times between 1961 and 1969, and they would double again in the first half of the 1970s (see figure 1). In 1969 the New York Times mentioned economists nine times more often than anthropologists, four times more than sociologists, and nearly three times more often than psychologists. This happened before the newspaper, in an attempt to catch up with the Wall Street Journal, created the supplement Business Day in 1978.

Tiago Mata 5

*** FIGURE 1 ***

Greater visibility was accompanied by increased esteem. One marker of cultural and civic distinction in mid-century America was to be portrayed on the cover of Time magazine. The first professor of economics to be on the cover of Time, in 1934, was Rexford Tugwell for reasons of state rather than of scholarship. After Tugwell and, if we slight the Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, only in 1961 would again a professor of economics earn this honour. Walter Heller was pictured twice in 1961-62, matched by John Kenneth Galbraith who was on the cover in 1962 and 1968. The most stunning appearance was a resurrection. John Maynard Keynes was on the cover of the last issue of 1965, deemed a newsmaker nearly two decades after his death. The sixties closed with Milton Friedman on the cover of the 19 December 1969 issue. In all these instances fiscal policy was the primary subject of the reporting, and for the issues on Heller and Keynes, one event was pivotal - the tax cut of 1964 (see Stein (1996) and Sorensen (2009)). By visual queues and by text, economists were represented in Time as experts of government. The covers of Time of this period carried the bust of the newsmaker mounted against a symbolic background. Keynes was placed ahead of bubbling currencies. Bespectacled Heller and Friedman were backed (and fronted) by graphing paper and trending colourful lines (see figure 2). Time identified “perhaps the most important development in US economics” as “the emergence of … a body of statistical information on how the economy behaves” together with “statistical techniques [that] brought about … the ‘professionalization’ of economics” (Time, 1961, 15). A few years later it noted that economists “now sit confidently at the elbow of almost every important leader in Government and business, where they are called upon to forecast, plan and decide” (Time, 1965, 47). Economists were conceived as engineers equipped with tools to forecast and control private and public enterprise (Mata, 2011). To the press economists appeared newsworthy because their technical

Tiago Mata 6 sophistication had granted them access to sites of power. Economists had the ear of Presidents and of the captains of industry and finance.

*** FIGURE 2 ***

The attention given to economists is surprising, since compared to other periods in American history, the 1960s lacked economic drama. This publicity was earned not by force of external events but by the concerted efforts of prominent economists, professional associations, and philanthropies to educate the mass public about the science. In the early years of the Cold War, economics, like most of social science, had been deemed suspect of social engineering and of statist (perhaps socialist) deviance. The discipline was excluded from federal patronage and target of a variety of subtle and not so subtle harassment (Goodwin, 1999; Solovey, 2013; Solberg and Tomilson, 1997; Giraud, 2014). One crucial component of the effort to remake the public profile of economics in the Cold War years was a program of mass education, scripted by the American Economic Association (AEA), the most influential organization in American economics and led by a cadre of academics. The association created a standing committee on economic education in 1956 but and it was in the 1960s that it recorded real progress. In 1960-61, the AEA staffed a National Task Force on Economic Education funded by the Committee on Economic Development (a liberal leaning business association), which recommended and lobbied for several reforms to high school teaching. The AEA then sponsored a year long television course ,“The American Economy,’ shown nationwide over C.B.S. and educational TV stations in 1962-63 and in 1963-64 (JEE, 1978). The AEA committee further reinvigorated in 1964, partnered with the Joint Committee on Economic Education to create a journal that shared reports on how to improve teaching and reach the lay, and a “Test of Understanding of Economics” (TUCE) to measure the outcomes of these initiatives. The Ford Foundation and later the National Science Foundation funded further reports that called for adding economics to the curricula of business schools and other academic divisions (Fourcade and Khurana, 2013). Economists and their institutional allies campaigned successfully

Tiago Mata 7 to establish their subject as indispensible to an intelligent citizenry. By 1969 this effort was crowned with the creation of a “Nobel prize” for economics, the only social science to share in the publicity bounty of the Nobels.3 A fuller account of the reasons for the authority of economics, above and beyond the media, includes an analysis of the politics of expertise in American and global government, and of the pull of a rising number of graduating economists taking managerial roles in private and public bureaucracies (Fourcade, 2006; Fourcade, Ollion, Algan, 2015). Circumstantial and institutional reasons may have carried economists to positions of privilege, despite themselves, but economists believed they deserved the applause, and it was this message of confidence that they broadcast in the media. Their belief in a modern, coherent and cohesive discipline was justified by reference to a basic set of insights that circulated in economics instruction, in its “tests of understanding” and in the profession’s assertiveness. Economists could thus claim policy successes, first among these the expansion following the 1964 tax cut, as outcomes of a rigorous science. In this script, economics was a science of government, and economists’ deserved to hold the public’s attention to educate it.

Arguing for reform

Media attention to economics became institutionalized in the 1970s economists were invited to write regular columns and op-eds in the press, and economic editors and journalists were added to newsrooms as it happened (Gussow, 1984; Weiss, Singer, Endreny, 1987). Out of the media’s internal logic a set of a dozen memorable academics were repeatedly sought after in print and broadcast. They were called to offer forecasts for the ritual end of year reviews and to interpret major policy turns or turbulence in the markets. Those media economists included Heller, Galbraith and Friedman but also several current and past members of the Council of Economic Advisers and the figureheads of the academic discipline, such as Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow. The “Nobel prize” added a trickle of a few more names to the list. As media personalities, they became interesting, and the public was invited to learn about their life stories, convictions and personalities (see for instance Silk (1976)).

Tiago Mata 8 The attention given to economists was also manifest in a greater awareness for the discipline’s internal schisms and disputes. For instance, the emergence of a collective of New Left economists scandalously challenging the academic mainstream in the years of 1968-1972 was widely reported in the press (Mata 2009). If the discovery of dissent was a factor in unravelling economists’ triumphant self-presentation of consensus an equally upsetting development to their self-confidence were the failings of government policy. Postwar, the “dismal science” had learned how not to be so dismal. At the start of the 1970s the common view among economic advisers was still seeing prosperity ahead. If the advice of economists was followed then no major turmoil in markets, unemployment or inflation needed to be endured. It became less and less clear whether policy makers were listening to their economist advisers, but it was apparent that policies were not meeting their stated goals. In August 15 1971, President Nixon declared that the dollar would no longer be convertible to gold. After confusion and benign neglect the President accepted a regime of floating international exchanges that made the value of the dollar a new object of national anxiety. At the same time Nixon imposed strict wage and price controls to stem inflation which helped him win the election of 1972. Because of the 1973 oil embargo or by policy failure, the USA reached double digit inflation on the same year that the President resigned in shame. Inflation, unemployment, the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, deindustrialization and loss of international competitiveness, made up a long list of economic woes. Time covers from the 1970s on economic subjects no longer framed the nerdy likeness of professors of economics. They included crying dollar bills (twice), a defensive Adam Smith, and fumbling policy makers (Presidents and professors turned officials) trying to hold off economic decline. Later in the decade and in the early 1980s the covers’ imagery was of revolt and of bold and drastic acts (see figure 3). In these dramatic years, economists did not lose prominence (see figure 1), but they could not easily claim esteem or rehearse a message of optimism and self-confidence in their policy record.

*** FIGURE 3 ***

Tiago Mata 9

Conflicted advice on how to face the multitude of challenges, allowed non- credentialed policy gurus to claim the vacated space of optimism and self- confidence. In 1978, in an immodestly titled book called How the World Works and in a series of companion articles, Jude Wanninski, a former editorial writer of the Wall Street Journal outlined a new doctrine for economics called “supply side economics”. The group that rallied around this term and its proposal of tax cuts was led by Congressman Jack Kemp and included a few academic economists, notoriously Arthur Laffer, but it was mostly made up of journalists and politicians. Rather than asserting their jurisdictional claims, the first response of the leaders of the economics discipline to the fantastic claims of the group was muted tolerance. The acceptance of pseudo-experts may seem like a reluctance by economists to police their epistemic and institutional turf, but it was evidence of something else. The conception of economics’ contribution to government was shifting. In academia emerged a New Classical macroeconomics and the Public Choice school increased its ascent. In economists’ polemical writings, indictments of government failure replaced the promises of prosperity. Economists to the left and to the right looked to reform, set on changing the size and practices of government. What not to do in government became as important as what to do.

The professors of Newsweek

To examine the play of economists’ imagination, I chose a unique record, the opinion columns of Newsweek. What makes this record special is the authorship. Among the columnists were Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman. Born three years apart, Samuelson and Friedman are probably the most influential academic economists in the USA in the second half of the twentieth century. Their first encounter was as students in Great Depression Chicago. From there they built their careers with matching drive and accomplishment. Samuelson was the recipient of the first John Bates Clark medal, given to talented economists under the age of forty. Friedman was the third recipient. Samuelson was the first American winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Friedman won it six years later.

Tiago Mata 10 Both were Presidents of the American Economic Association, and the iconic leaders of two of the nation’s most prestigious graduate schools at MIT and at the University of Chicago. Samuelson and Friedman’s identified with academic economics without hesitation or reservation. There was no trace of irony when Samuelson deemed the applause of his peers as the “only coin worth having” (Samuelson, 1962, 18). Both men believed their scholarly vocation to be compatible with civic engagement, and were named advisors to Presidential campaigns (JF Kennedy and Barry Goldwater) and many times consulted by elected officials and public servants. Between 1966 and 1984, Friedman and Samuelson wrote a column of 740 to 760 words every three weeks.4 The timing of their arrival at Newsweek is significant. In the months following the 1964 tax cut, praise for economics reached new heights and one might guess that this event was the motivation for their hiring. There is no surviving evidence of careful consultation or deliberation to suggest this was the case. Instead, the men joined Newsweek as a result of efforts to rejuvenate the cultural and political outlook of the magazine. In 1961, the Washington Post group purchased Newsweek from the Astor estate and placed 36-year-old Osborn Elliott as its managing editor. Elliott transformed the magazine from a conservative and detached observer of politics to a sympathetic chronicler of civil rights and other progressive causes (Tebbel and Zuckerman, 1991). With the resources of a major metropolitan newsroom, Newsweek gained access to the White House, to the movements of the sixties and to popular culture. Elliott’s stated ambition was that Newsweek become faster and bolder at identifying trends and, contrary to newsmagazine conventions, also at looking to solutions. His boldest effort was the issue of November 20, 1967, entitled “The Negro in America: What is to be Done? A program for action.” Rather than consult and defer to experts and officials, the magazine took collective responsibility for a 22 page essay of analysis and advocacy. Newsweek recruited the professors of economics at a time when it was aligning its interpretation of current events with state interventionism. Elliott moved slowly on changing the publication’s longstanding economic column (the oldest in newsmagazines, in existence since 1937). Only on his fourth

Tiago Mata 11 year in charge of the magazine did Elliot add “Yale [University’s] middle-roading Henry Wallich” “to counter the antedilluvian economics of Henry Hazlitt” (Elliott, 1980, 66). For two decades, Hazlitt had been the only economic opinion writer for the magazine (see table 1). Hazlitt was vehemently opposed to Keynesian fiscal stimulus and to mainstream economics (Boettke and Palagashvili, 2013), and had prophesized doom with the passing of the 1964 tax cut. Hazlitt’s misjudgement and his unrelenting criticism of the Democratic administration were embarrassing to the magazine. By contrast to Hazlitt, who had no formal economics education and was a founding member of Friedrich Hayek’s Mount Pelerin Society, Wallich was a liberal Republican, moderate in beliefs and language, with credentials in academia and in public service. He was also already an employee of the company, as occasional editorial writer for the Washington Post.

*** TABLE 1 ***

Elliott was slow to re-staff the economic opinion because, since at least 1963, he was trying to lure Galbraith to write for the magazine, mindful of the latter’s growing influence within the Democratic party and the mass reading public. Galbraith however could not be convinced. “He just couldn’t write as short as that”, was how Elliott remembered their conversation and, as a result, Elliott “went across the river to MIT and put the question to Paul Samuelson “ (Elliott, 1980, 66). Despite the geographical distortion - because you don’t cross the Charles river on the trip from Harvard to MIT - this account is plausible. In 1966 Samuelson could have proxyed Galbraith’s access to the Democrat elite. Samuelson was an adviser to the Kennedy family and had been offered, and rejected, the post of chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Samuelson was on the same side of that river. Samuelson first declined the magazine’s invitation explaining that “I’m well-to-do and don’t need the money,” but he was easily swayed at the mention of an estimated (and very inflated) weekly readership of 14 million (ibid.). How Friedman was chosen to be the third man is harder to establish. Samuelson may have suggested him. Wallich remembers that

Tiago Mata 12 Samuelson was reluctant to write on a two week rotation with him, so they took the initiative of looking for a third writer and approached Friedman (Wallich, 1989, 128). The invitation may have been in Elliott’s plans all along as a way to retire Hazlitt. Friedman was the last to be invited and the one who hesitated most before accepting. He was overtly daunted by the commitment to write regularly and made his acceptance conditional on having his colleague George Stigler write two columns a year. 5 On this evidence the appointment of the trio was poorly conceived, but it proved to be an effective way to distinguish Newsweek from its competitors, first among them, Time. 6 The trio was graced by instant reader appreciation and by an award. Elliott received a special G.M. Loeb Award for “innovation and unique achievement” in assembling the economists.7 The prize was for the editorial decision to recruit the professors. Their writing, also submitted for consideration, received no prize. Although it was often mentioned and occasionally praised, the Nobel laureates collected no honours for their journalism. Before turning, in the following sections, to changing conceptions of the place of economics in the polity, I want first to describe the topics that filled the opinion pages of Newsweek. The professors enjoyed complete discretion in their choice of subjects and their writing was only lightly copy-edited. An analysis of the columns reveals that the professors addressed the same topics employing the same words, i.e. referring to the same objects of economic life. One approach to identify, in a synoptic way, the topics of the trio’s columns, is to draw on methods from computational linguistics. By defining a topic as a set of statistically co-occurring words, one can classify a corpus, such as the opinion columns, as a composite of topics. The algorithm (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) identifies lexical patterns and on this criteria we find extensive overlap between the three authors. I classified the corpus of the professors’ columns (Wallich, Samuelson, Friedman and Thurow) into 22 topics (McCallum, 2002).8 Four topics taken together accounted for 69% of the authors’ writing, the remaining 18 topics take a small share of less than 3% of the text each (see table 2). The more dominant topics do not change in share over the years, and thus seem to be

Tiago Mata 13 unresponsive to current affairs (see figure 5). The analysis records a lot of repetition in the writing of the professors.

*** TABLE 2 ***

*** FIGURE 4 ***

*** FIGURE 5 ***

The topic with the largest share (number 11 on table 2) is identified by the frequent use of terms “inflation, money, interest rates, federal reserve”, and corresponds to discussion of the actions of the federal reserve and the plight of inflation. It marks out columns such as “Shifting Gears” (Wallich, 23/11/1970), “Purchasing-Power Bonds” (Friedman, 12/4/1971), “A Year of Opportunity” (Samuelson, 31/1/1977). The next topic in share of the text (number 19 on table 2) has as key terms “united states, balance payments, world, dollar” and appears most frequently in Wallich’s writing. It refers to the monitoring of the balance of payments as a measure of competitiveness, while also including discussions about industrial relations. Columns where this topic is prevalent include “Financial Prohibition” (Wallich, 22/1/1968), “A silver lining” (Friedman, 1/2/1971), “Mr. Nixon’s Economic Report” (Samuelson, 18/2/1974). The remaining two large topics are associated primarily with either Samuelson or Friedman. One topic that is five times more important for Samuelson than for other writers has keywords of “wall street, president, growth” (number 18 on table 2) and denotes discussions linking the financial and the real economy. Similarly one topic that is five times more evident in Friedman’s writing than for others (number 7 on table 2) has keywords “monetary growth, government spending, price, fed.” In his memoirs Friedman retrospectively estimated that “monetary and fiscal policy [was] a popular topic (well over one- third of all my columns)” (Friedman and Friedman 1999, 360). This counter estimate scores these subjects (topics 7 and 11) as 57% of his writing.

Tiago Mata 14 The main finding of this analysis is that nearly half of the professors’ writing was lexically similar (see figure 4). To find that they shared the same words, and the same associations between words, is not surprising. It gives substance to Friedman’s statement to Time in the 1965 feature on economics, “We are all Keynesians.” Friedman intended not to confess his approval to counter-cyclical fiscal policy, but to remark how the language of macroeconomics was indelibly linked to Keynes and was shared by scholars of opposing beliefs. It was also, as we see from the Newsweek columns, the lexicon that permeated economists’ discussion of current affairs. If we take this shared and recurring lexicon as an indication of the objects the professors identified in the economy, we see that they adhered to an unchanging ontology. I will show that the imaginative work was not ontological, its focus was to relocate the economists and their public within this ontology.

Imagining influence

The 12 September 1966 issue of Newsweek introduced Friedman as “a leading conservative economic thinker”, Samuelson as “one of the nation's leading liberal economists,” and with both ends of the political spectrum spoken for, Wallich occupied the center. As he put it, “I'm in the middle.” Rivalry between the professors was unquestionable but they handled it thoughtfully and it was not of the sort previewed by Newsweek. The professors thus took special delight to diverge whenever possible from the pattern imposed by their Newsweek introductions. In 1968 and 1969 the trio was brought together in a special feature to debate policy prospects. The outcome did not align with the left-right axis. On several other occasions the professors were critical of their party of membership, for instance when Samuelson gave President Johnson a B for his economic leadership (“The State of the Economy”, 23/1/ 1967). Rivalry was carefully scripted. In an interview published in the mid-1970s, Paul Samuelson told the story of why at the start of his career he refused a job offer from the University of Chicago. He believed that joining Friedman as a colleague “would polarize me, it would radicalize me in a way I didn’t want to be radicalized” (Silk, 1976, 18).9 The story told the reader of a long past of

Tiago Mata 15 controversy between the two men. It also cautioned the reader that Friedman was of a radical disposition while Samuelson chose a path of restraint and convention. Samuelson carried the same representations to Newsweek. He referred to Friedman 14 times by direct mention and through neologisms that suggested dogmatism, such as “Friedmanite” and “Friedmanian”, in several instances in 1969, and in 1970, 1971, 1976 and 1978. Friedman did not reciprocate. He mentioned Samuelson by name four times and three of those appear in a column on October 1970 where he quoted “Professor Samuelson” liberally because they agreed on fundamental issues concerning the parity of the dollar.10 But this omission was not a sign of agreement. It was a rhetorical choice to stay clear of ad hominem arguments, and to always address differences in reasoning and not between reasoners.11 The differences between the two men on matters of policy were evident. From the publication in 1956 of his restatement of the quantity theory of money, Friedman was engaged in an intellectual project to create an alternative to Keynesian macroeconomic policy and his Presidential lecture to the AEA in the winter of 1967 was a call to arms. Samuelson was a strong candidate for the title of the discipline’s foremost Keynesian. His paper with Bob Solow in 1960, reviewing inflation policies and naming the “Phillips curve”, was a favourite target of the monetarists.12 In Friedman’s two decades writing for Newsweek, only six times and in only three columns did he use the term “monetarism” that so clearly identified him in academic controversies.13 In omitted or explicit terms the media writing of the economists was animated by intellectual rivalries. Unlike what was implied in Newsweek’s name-calling the root of the contest was not ideological but was rather grounded in academic controversy and in the open competition to reach and persuade policy makers. It was a fundamental belief for professors raising their voice in public that economic knowledge was a touchstone of policy discussions. Samuelson was more willing to solicit his readers’ appreciation of the science. He mytholigized the patriarchs of the discipline in obituaries, for instance saying of Alvin Hansen that “the Employment act … is his permanent legacy” (16/6/1975) and of Frank Knight that “Many of the New Left are Knight without the market…. Frank Knight

Tiago Mata 16 lives on” (31/7/1972). He also hounded those pretend doctors that were undeserving to be counted as economists, for instance Arthur Laffer (“Economic Snake-Oil” 8/3/1971). A word count illustrates that the discipline was a central character in the professors’ writing for Newsweek. Between 1966 and 1974, when the trio wrote together and before Wallich left the magazine, Samuelson used the term “economics” a total of 136 times, Wallich used it 66 times, and Friedman 20 times. The term “economist” and cognates offered a slightly different count of respectively 125, 74, and 52. In this period the three professors averaged a mention of economics or economists once in every column (see figure 6). References to the discipline matched the increasing curiosity and attention given to economics in this period, but it served other more immediate purposes. It signified economists’ self-awareness. As Samuelson phrased it in his Presidential lecture to the AEA, “Ours [economists’] is an uncertain truth and economic scholars are humble about its precision – but our humbleness is built out of knowledge, not out of ignorance” (Samuelson, 1962, 18).

*** FIGURE 6 ***

The most common format of the economists’ columns was to subject a policy proposal or decision to rational test. They might list arguments for and against new instruments, such as an “investment tax credit” (31/3/1969), and defer the final say to policy makers concluding that “In economics, every decision involves pros and cons. Judgment is necessary.” For Friedman as for Samuelson the sources of error in government were not ill motives, passion or stupidity, most often they were bad reasoning. One reads this plainly in Friedman’s inaugural column, where he concluded that “The rise in the legal minimum-wage rate is a monument to the power of superficial thinking” (“Minimum-Wage Rates” 12/9/1966). The columns of the professors up to mid-1970s typically addressed policy makers foreseeing for them the consequences of policy alternatives. The columns imagined economists as doctors giving counsel to men of power by diagnosing and prescribing ways to ensure America’s prosperity. The professors’ optimism was humble but unfailing.

Tiago Mata 17 In this imagined relationship of influence the public was merely a witness. Intellectual rivalry and competition shaped the disagreements between the authors, and economics and its disputes are explicit and implicit in the contrasting prescriptions. The public was told of the conclusions but it was never invited to the inner chambers of economics, never explained its practices and methods. The public was absent from economics in the media.

Imagining insurrection

Circumstances changed drastically in the middle years of the 1970s, not only because of the persistence of inflation and unemployment but also out of disappointment and shock with a Presidency ending in scandal. As Watergate depressed the nation it also energized the press, and in particular the Washington Post, elevating the expose as the highest form of civic journalism. At Newsweek, this changing mood was met by a new relationship between economists and their readers. The professors began to address them as much as they addressed decision makers past them. In readers’ letters a common theme was to contrast Friedman’s openness, simplicity and clarity of writing with Samuelson’s abrasive prose and exhaustiveness. One reader wrote to Friedman that “Your colleague from Harvard (sic) is so interested in making wisecracks and cute comments that I usually can’t follow him."14 Friedman was unfailingly polite to his readers, generous even to the cranks, sending them free of charge reprints of his papers, and compiling reading lists (which he reused across several requests). He was also always more provocative to authority, his opening words at Newsweek were “Congress has just acted to increase unemployment” (“Minimum-Wage Rates” 26/9/1966), and he used terms like “establishment” to refer to the political class.15 Both because of his populist leanings and because he came to know his readers, Friedman gained confidence to write to them and of them in Newsweek. The opinion pages continued to subject policy choices to quantitative review and examination but a new conception emerged alongside the austere professorial analysis. The professors claimed a more militant tone that promised

Tiago Mata 18 insights on the hidden dimensions of government policy and to unmask how special interests were injuring the consumer and the taxpayer (an early example is "Humphrey-Hawkins" 2/8/1976). The most frequent and salient subject for this kind of commentary was inflation. Coherent with his academic record Friedman analysed inflation, in so far as it was a policy goal, as a monetary phenomena. He asserted an easy to grasp age old causality between the Federal Reserve’s printing press and a lagged rise in prices. As often as four times a year he repeated the same column. He would either predict the next movement in inflation or explain past ones by reference to minimalist two column tables summarizing growth in the stock of money. From the mid-1970s alongside these technical considerations, Friedman returned to inflation as a social justice issue. Persistent inflation was partly the result of incompetence by the Federal Reserve, but he now added an explanation for why it remain unchecked, it was a covert source of finance for the state. Friedman wrote that inflation “is a hidden tax that no representative or senator needs to vote for. It is collected efficiently, automatically and silently."(“Dealing with Discontent” 19/8/1974) Friedman also explained that as individuals’ income was raised to meet higher prices, they would be placed in higher ranges of the income tax schedule and thus political authorities “can propose and vote tax cuts while the effective tax rate goes up. How to have your cake and eat it too!" ("When Is a Tax Cut Not a Tax Cut?" 17/1/1977). The economic illiteracy of the Federal Reserve was of lesser importance than to indict the vested interests of those using inflation to expropriate the public. The purpose for writing to Newsweek’s millions of readers was no longer only to educate them in economics but also to draw them in a campaign against the size of the government. Most of Friedman’s columns of this kind were written with words of indignation, resentment, and insinuations of conspiracy. Perhaps realizing that such negative valence was not very appealing, Friedman conjured also fanciful and amusing scenarios such as a new holiday that would move around the calendar as a measure of individuals tax burden. He explained that “Personal Independence Day‚ [was] that day in the year when we stop working to pay the expenses of government‚ … and start working to pay for the items we

Tiago Mata 19 severally and individually choose in light of our own needs and desires." (“A New Holiday” 58/8/1974) To encourage demands to privatize state enterprises he asked his readers "how would you like to become a dividend-receiving shareholder - rather than a taxpayer subsidizing losses - in a revitalized post office, Amtrak, ConRail, TVA, and so on and on and on?" ("How to Denationalize" 27/12/1976).16 The culmination of Friedman’s militant Newsweek writing was the tax revolt of the late 1970s. In 1977 Friedman retired and moved from Chicago to northern California where he became a fellow of the Hoover Institution. There he joined the campaign for tax limitation that culminated in the victory of proposition 13, which reduced property taxes to 1% of the property’s value and required two thirds majorities in California’s Congress and Senate for future increases of state taxes.17 To Friedman the campaign was a citizens’ protest that was opposed by “a massive campaign … by the Establishment …” and by “desperate feeders at the public trough” (“The Message from California” 19/6/1978). Friedman refused to join campaigns sponsored by corporations, to serve in boards of directors, or endorse local and community candidates for office, but to join the ranks of the tax protesters was for him a noble civic calling. He interpreted the movement in terms of his own intellectual interests linking the protests to inflation and writing that “inflation is a form of taxation that no one has voted for. The tax revolt is partly a modern version of the Boston Tea Party - a protest against taxation without representation” (“The Paternal State” 22/1/1979). In the columns on tax limitation Friedman set aside the details of state finances and the long term consequences of the proposals, for a message about public economic knowledge. Addressing the political class, he cautioned that it “should be clarion clear. ….The public is getting sophisticated. It will demand performance and not merely promises”. The most important lesson of proposition 13 was that the public “refused to be bamboozled …, as they had been so often before while watching taxes mount and governmental services deteriorate” (“The Message from California” 19/6/1978). The citizens of California had grasped the essentials of the economic problem better than the officials and the experts who

Tiago Mata 20 Friedman deemed delusional, “unreal and artificial”, “denizens of [a] strange land” that “are persuaded that their constituents want both higher taxes and more government spending” (“Tax, Tax, Spend, Spend” 31/5/1982). While Friedman claimed the tax activists to be sophisticated, fellow economists demurred and were troubled by his advocacy for proposition 13. They witnessed him appearing in paid political TV advertisements declaring that “money will be more productive to Californians if spent by the private sector. … that we now have a chance to show the government who is boss.” And as he made these bold claims in absence of study or expertise, gold printed across the screen was “Dr. Milton Friedman/Nobel Prizewinning/ Economist.” In his defence Friedman explained that “he was speaking as a citizen, not primarily as a scientific economist.” 18 “We”, as we the public, replaced we the economists. The overt goal of this writing was to mobilize. About tax cuts Friedman wrote that “Our basic long-term need is to stop the explosive growth in government spending. I am persuaded that the only effective way to do so is by cutting taxes - at any time for any excuse in any way." ("Two Economic Fallacies" 12/5/1975). His tone was of a campaigner when he confided to this readers that

We must redouble our efforts. Unless we can limit the cancerous growth in government, unless we can stop the shift of power from city hall to Statehouse, and from Statehouse to the White House, there is little hope of maintaining a free political system. The longer the delay, the harder the task, because the tribe of bureaucrats grows apace. (“After the election” 15/11/1976)

And in the year of proposition 13, he was even more graphic saying that "Is it not time that we rebelled against the doctrine that each of us has indelibly stamped on his back: ‘Property of the U.S. Government. Do not fold, spindle or mutilate’?" (“"What belongs to whom?" 13/3/1978).19 The pull away from the civil but competitive debate over policy alternatives changed the grounds and intensity of the rivalry between the celebrity economists. The clash was fierce between Friedman and Galbraith. In 1978 they had an increasingly bitter letter exchange on the pages of The Times of

Tiago Mata 21 London,20 but the best summation of their encounter is in a personal letter of Galbraith to Friedman. It read:

For years you have been picturing me as the misguided, befuddled, perhaps slightly fraudulent friend of the masses — as indeed you do in your letter. My tolerant, even Gandhian temperament prevented me from ever replying in kind. Instead I more than turned a cheek. In these last years you have become, more than any scholar I can remember, the hero of the rich.21

Similarly, Samuelson read politics and class interest into the tax revolt and, always brief on the subject, stated that “There is a science fiction of the right as well as of the left and center. Read it and enjoy. But don't bet your nest egg on wishful fantasies” (“Economic Scares” 11/9/1978). The compelling urgency of political action drew Friedman closer to pseudo-experts such as “supply side economics”. Friedman was equivocal when faced with the fantastic claims of “supply side’s” proposed tax cut that allegedly would pay for itself by unleashing entrepreneurship and increasing the tax base. He called it a “free lunch”, which for Friedman was an impossible object, but while he disputed the fundamentals of the group’s claim he found redeeming circumstances that might offer compensating revenues for the state purse. In the end he offered his support justifying his judgment with political expediency. All means to contain the size of the state were desirable regardless of how they were argued (“The Kemp-Roth Free Lunch“ 7/4/1978). Friedman was soon in the company of the “supply siders” as advisers to the Presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan. Friedman’s campaigning to shrink the fiscal state was unseeming for a left of centre magazine concerned with social justice, but his rhetoric of populism and protest suited the magazine’s interest in civil rights and social movements. Friedman only twice criticized the magazine in his columns. The first instance happened when he was barely a year on the job over the already mentioned “Negro in America” issue and again over a sceptical outlook on “Reagan’s

Tiago Mata 22 America” (5/4/1982). In both instances his text was published as submitted with the editors’ response arriving by personal post.22 Friedman never hesitated to congratulate Newsweek for keeping his hand free, correcting one disgruntled reader that Newsweek “has never tried to censor, alter or in any way modify anything I have written.”23 While Samuelson’s relationship with the magazine was also only sporadically fraught, in his case the resolution was not amicable. On a half dozen occasions, the editors of Newsweek disagreed with Samuelson’s choice of topic, twice on columns written as book reviews.24 In May 1981 Samuelson’s column was to be a review of Galbraith’s A Life in Our Times, but it was never printed. Only several days after publication did Samuelson discover, by inspection of a newsstand copy, that his column had been withheld. The gross discourtesy led an irate Samuelson to abruptly terminate his Newsweek affiliation. The magazine’s principals treated the event as an innocent editorial lapse, and expressed regret for his decision but there was no pleading for him to reconsider.25 The magazine maintained the arrangement of economists as before, by inviting Lester Thurow from MIT to replace Samuelson. It is plausible that Samuelson was tired of the writing. After ending his Newsweek engagement and unlike Friedman, he retreated from the media spotlight. My reading of the Newsweek columns suggests that persistent inflation and political scandal set in motion a change in the play of the imagination of celebrity economists. Between the columnists a new conception of their differences emerged that replaced the polite but competitive presentation of alternative policy plans by emotionally charged advocacy and appeals to protest. More significantly, instead of writing as if addressing decision makers, the columnists addressed their readers. The new imaginary of a polity informed by economics was a redesigned state with redrawn scope and practices. The ideal replaced the horizon of prosperity managed by economic expertise. The arguments for this transformation were political but also epistemological. Friedman explained that “We [the public but also economists] simply do not know enough - or, equivalently, the economy is too complex and variable - for us to be able to manipulate the fine-tuning dials with enough precision to get the desired results.”

Tiago Mata 23 (“Steady as you Go!” 10/1/1977). The crucial truth was to recognize that the kind of economic policy that had first brought economists to the attention of the media could never work.

Celebrity Economists and the work of the imagination

The era of the economist columnists ended with a reorientation of Newsweek. In the late 1970s the title was losing ground to Time. It had set itself on a misguided path of levity, with entertainment and human interest topics replacing weighty political fare (Kosner, 2007). From 1984, a new managing editor, Richard Smith re-identified the magazine with original reporting and journalistic values (Shepard, 2012). Smith was unequivocal about his reasons both in correspondence with readers and with the economists, his stated purpose was to steer opinion pages “away from economic analysis and towards a form that would include both analysis and reportage.” The appropriate staff for the new format were two journalists, Jane Bryant Quinn (writing on personal finance since 1978) and Robert Samuelson (to write on economic current affairs).26 Friedman could not object to this decision, but he was bitter by the magazine’s attempts to distract readers from the decision, such as keeping him on payroll and on the masthead until the end of the year.27 Economists continued and continue to write opinion, for major metropolitan newspapers, for business magazines, in blogs and newsletters. In this essay I have examined the dynamics of celebrity economists’ media presence in a period that is historically significant. On the second year of the professors’ tenure at Newsweeek, The New Industrial State by Galbraith topped the New York Times Non-Fiction Best Seller list, a rare achievement for an economist, even for Galbraith. It occurred again in April 1980, when Milton and Rose Friedman climbed the list with Free to Choose. The latter was a companion text to their TV series, and a response to Galbraith’s BBC production, Age of Uncertainty (Burgin 2013). Fenced by these two landmarks is a period where academic economists emerged as celebrities and an elite among them dominated the media space. At the same time, American economists’ claim to authority in policy deliberations was injured by the challenges of inflation, unemployment and the

Tiago Mata 24 breakdown of the Bretton Woods system. That crisis never imperiled economists’ jurisdictional claims. One aspect of economists’ successful response was an intellectual move away from promises of prosperity through state interventionism towards arguments calling for state reform. As the columns of Newsweek show this was accompanied by reimagining economists apart from privileged connections with state and corporate power and nearer popular militancy. As a matter of fact the two imaginaries of privilege and populism overlapped and coexisted. Samuelson was reluctant to step out of the role of cold- headed intellectual and scholar, and Friedman never stopped writing columns addressing men in power. This kind of doublespeak - at times servants to power, at times its antagonists - is part of the repertoire of contemporary economics, as Phillip Mirowski has recently shown with regard to the current financial crisis (Mirowski 2014). To represent the place of economists in the polity requires the work of the imagination. In their Newsweek writings and with greater intensity at the start of their careers there, Samuelson and Friedman addressed matters of national policy as if advising decision makers through the surrogate means of the press. From the mid-1970s, this role was reconceived. They posed as fierce muckrakers set on unveiling under the technical detail of elite discourse the machinations of special interest. Friedman saw in the “tax revolt” movement the model audience for this new identity. To set limits on the fiscal claims of the state he set limits on the claims of economic knowledge. In this new outlook, the importance of economists’ technical expertise was diminished, far more significant were simple and personal truths that could be communicated in 700 words or less.

1 The claim that policy failure led to the breakdown of Keynesian fiscalism is so widespread that it evades easy referencing. One finds it in journalistic accounts, such as Yergin and Stanislaw (1998) and scholarly ones, such as Prasad (2006) or Stein (2011). See Phillips-Fein (2011) for an historical survey offering a longer view.

2 The total tax revenue of the United States federal government and tax revolts have not direct correlation. Episodes of mobilization around taxes in the twentieth century alone include 1925, 1943, 1951, 1957, 1979, and 1995 (Martin, 2013). Total tax revenue has changed little since the 1960s. It peaked in 1969 at 26.6% of GDP then returning to a stable 24-25% where it was and remained during the tax revolts of the late 1970s. The

Tiago Mata 25 total tax revenue has risen again in the 1990s reaching a new high at 28.4% by 2000. It once again dropped and is now at levels similar to the 1960s (OECD, 2014, pp. 85-88).

3 The prize was not of the initiative of the Nobel Foundation but of the Swedish central bank as the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”. The winner is selected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences as is the case for Physics and Chemistry.

4 In the first two years they were paid 750 dollars per column, later twenty thousand dollars a year and from 1973 twenty three thousand a year. Two years after starting with the magazine, Friedman pressed for a review of the arrangement, mentioning “alternative opportunities” and asking for at least double the original amount. The second pay raise in 1973 was initiated by the magazine. By the mid-1970s, the economists were also being paid one thousand dollars whenever they participated in colloquia hosted by Newsweek. Letter from Osborn Elliot to Milton Friedman, July 14, 1966; Friedman to Elliott, October 23, 1968 and December 10, 1968; Elliott to Friedman, December 30, 1974, in box 228, Milton Friedman Papers, Hoover Institution.

5 In their coupled biography Rose Friedman tells the story of how Friedman joined Newsweek but does not clarify who’s idea it was. She implies that she convinced Milton to accept, but Milton mentions Stigler and Samuelson as equally important persuaders (M. Friedman and Friedman 1999). The arrangement of having Stigler as stand in is contained in a letter from Osborn Elliot to Friedman, July 14, 1966, in box 228, Friedman Papers. The arrangement was never enacted.

6 Time created a “Board of Economists” as a brain trust for the economic reporting in the magazine. The Board meet four times a year with the editorial staff for a daylong analysis of the economy and was consulted regularly on individual stories. In 1970, the members were Otto Eckstein, a Harvard professor and head of Data Resources Inc., a consulting firm, Walter Heller, professor of economics at the University of Minnesota, David Grove, vice president and chief economist of IBM, and Robert Nathan, president of a consulting firm.

7 GM Loeb awards to Oz, April 22, 1968, sent to Friedman, in box 228, Friedman Papers.

8 The number of topics is set by the researcher. I chose to report on 22 after experimenting with models with topics 5 through to 40. I settled on 22 because it’s results (distribution of topics and statistics) were stable across its closest neighbors, i.e. models with 20, 21, 23, 24 were all similar. The number label given to topics is arbitrary.

9 It is unlikely that Friedman was a decisive reason in Samuelson’s refusal to join Chicago. A more plausible explanation can be found in the intellectual appeal of the Boston/Cambridge area and the opportunities that MIT promised an ambitious and impatient mathematical economist (Maas, 2014, Backhouse, 2014). It was around the time of the Chicago offer that Friedman and Samuelson engaged in a collaborative endeavour, to make available to the interested public a “summary of the expert knowledge of economists” on “economic instability.” The report was published by the American Economic Association and prepared by a five person subcommittee of the Association’s Committee on Public Issues, chaired by Donald Wallace of Princeton with Samuelson and Friedman as members (Despres et al. ,1950).

Tiago Mata 26

10 When both spoke to Congress’s Joint Economic Committee in September 1971 to review Richard Nixon’s policy overhaul that summer, Samuelson challenged Friedman in direct and provocative terms but Friedman would not respond. See “Statement and Testimony”by Milton Friedman and Paul A. Samuelson In U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, The President's New Economic Program. Part 4: Hearings before the Joint Economic Committee, pp. 698-743. 92nd Congress, 1st Session, 23 September 1971.

11 When either men won their Nobel awards the other wrote a congratulations column where he reviewed their record of disagreement. In 1970, Friedman wrote that “the layman has a vision of economists as a quarrelsome tribe who never agree. Paul Samuelson and I, for example, disagree frequently, strongly and publicly on matters of public policy. But the vision is also distorted. [...] there is wide agreement among economists.” Six years later, Samuelson returned the compliment but was oblique about the possibilities of scientific consensus stating that “despite our policy disagreements and scientific differences, have remained good friends over 40 years [and that] says something perhaps about us, but even more I dare to think about political economy as a science.”(“Paul Samuelson” 9/11/1970, “Milton Friedman” 25/10/1976).

12 On Friedman’s identification and undermining of the “Phillips curve” as the Keynesians’ primary account of inflation, see Forder (2010; 2014).

13 Monetarism appears once in an argument about how as a policy it had no ideological content since it was in use in Russia and China (“Marx and money”, 27/10/1980, 95), once examining Nixon’s policies (“Closet Keynesianism”, 27/7/1981, 60) and several mentions in an instance where the academic debate is reviewed, with the stated goal of separating Monetarism as scientific analysis from Monetarism as policy prescription (“Defining Monetarism”, 12/7/1982, 64).

14 The quote is from a letter by John W. Douglass to Milton Friedman, September 25, 1972, box 228, Friedman Papers. Not everyone shared the same assessment, a letter from Emmet John Hughes (Washington Post columnist) to Samuelson reported that "Last night, I read your first offering In NEWSWEEK, and I heard myself generating that weird semi- human noise that can only be heard when someone tries to chuckle and cheer at the same time. The mingling of wit and wisdom simply produced total delight." Paul A. Samuelson papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

15 Friedman’s inaugural column predicted that unemployment among “Negro boys” would rise to “30 per cent or more” as a result of raising the minimum wage rate from $1.25 to $1.60 an hour. Samuelson was impressed by Friedman’s inaugural column and requested the rights to reprint it for teaching.

16 “No taxation without representation” was the subject of an early column of March 3, 1969, but the phrase gained in prominence and use in the years of the “tax limitation” campaign.

17 The short-history of “tax limitation” begins in 1973 with governor of California Ronald Reagan’s “proposition 1”, a cap on state revenues as a fixed percentage of state personal income. The ballot initiative was promoted by a Task Force headed by Lewis Uhler and created by Frank J. Walton, a businessman that joined Sacramento as Reagan’s business and transportation secretary and was later President of the Heritage Foundation (1975- 77). The Californian electorate voted down “proposition 1” but the attempt set in motion

Tiago Mata 27 initiatives within the state and beyond. Friedman consulted with Reagan during the campaign and together with Uhler founded the National Tax Limitation Committee, at whose inaugural meeting, to his “surprise and delight, some 200 persons from 38 states attended - at their own expense.” (“The Message from California” 19/6/1978).

18 Letter by Richard X. Hansen to Newsweek editor, June 6, 1978. Letter from Friedman to Hansen, July 25, 1978, box 228, Friedman Papers.

19 Rose Friedman described Milton’s columns as “like all of my husband’s work” falling “into two categories: positive economics and normative economics.”(Friedman and Friedman, 1999, 357). My suggestion is that despite his prescriptive methodological writings, at Newsweek the two types fold onto each other.

20 At Newsweek and elsewhere, Friedman only betrayed his embargo on ad hominem arguments when arguing with John Kenneth Galbraith. In 1976 at a public lecture hosted by the London Institute for Economic Affairs and later published as “From Galbraith to Freedom", Friedman hounded Galbraith as a “Tory Radical” a member of the intellectual aristocracy disdainful of the people. He concluded that “the characteristics [Galbraith] attributes to the world are essential to upholding his value position, his ideological position, his political position.” The terms of the attack were then common among conservative critics of Galbraith’s best sellers. George Will, William Buckley, and others faulted The Age of Affluence and The New Industrial State for patronizing the public as dupes who needed the aid of intellectuals to secure well-being.

21 Letter from Galbraith to Friedman, September 5, 1978, Friedman Papers.

22 Letter from Osborn Elliott to Friedman, Nov 29, 1967 and Friedman to Elliott, December 12, 1967, Friedman Papers.

23 Letter from Friedman to Theodore Morris July 9, 1982, Friedman Papers. The reader had written to the magazine cancelling his subscription after reading Friedman’s protest column “Newsweek of Poverty.” The observation that the magazine never tried to influence his writing tallied well with Friedman’s argument in Capitalism and Freedom (1962) that the private press would champion free speech.

24 In the fall of 1974 Samuelson submitted a review of Time on the Cross. The Newsweek editors felt that the book had been sufficiently covered at an earlier issue and with short notice requested that Samuelson write on another topic. Although recording his annoyance at the hurried demand, Samuelson complied and even invited further feedback by the editors and suggestions of topics. Letter by Ed Kosner to Samuelson, October 29, 1974, Letter by Paul Samuelson to Osborn Elliott, 21 October 1974, Samuelson Papers.

25 Letter by Samuelson to Lester Bernstein, June 1, 1981; Letter by Katharine Graham to Samuelson, June 15, 1981, Samuelson Papers.

26 Letter by Richard M. Smith to Friedman, January 18, 1984, Friedman Papers.

27 Letter by Friedman to Boschwitz, May 19, 1984, Friedman Papers. Friedman added that Robert “[Robert] Samuelson is certainly a great improvement in terms of content over [Lester] Thurow in my opinion."

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Tiago Mata 31 Tiago Mata 32 Virgil Jordan 1937 Ralph Robey 1938-1947 John Willis Love 1947 Henry Hazlitt 1947-1966 Henry Wallich* 1965-1974 Paul Samuelson* 1966-1981 Milton Friedman* 1966-1983 Lester Thurow* 1981-1983 Jane Bryant-Quinn 1978-2012 Robert Samuelson 1984-2012 Daniel Gross 2007-2012

Table 1. The tenure of Newsweek’s economic opinion writers 1937-2012. Author with * held academic appointment at time of writing.

Tiago Mata 33 % of topic in Topic Ten most frequent words/phrases per topic corpus key american, economic, percent, workers, savings, income, economy, productivity, security, 2.7% 0 social

funds, portfolio, market, dow, record, bank, reagan, jones, republicans, intellectuals 1.7% 1

dollar, gold, exchange, mark, official, nixon, parity, yen, german, japan 1.9% 2

countries, environment, labor, income, young, latin, damage, trade, left, role 1.6% 3

budget, percent, jobs, term, short, reagan, deficit, deficits, amendment, cuts 1.5% 4

schumpeter, lenin, martin, love, club, morgan, college, john, sweden, confess 1.0% 5

prices, gold, men, draft, banks, volunteer, armed, army, service, commercial 1.4% 6

monetary growth, government spending, price, fed, taxes, higher, effect, free, months, 14.2% 7 major

oil, energy, cartel, opec, domestic, gasoline, production, carter, unemployment, planning 2.3% 8

nixon, mcgovern, george, richard, profits, depreciation, monopoly, stagflation, inventory, 1.7% 9 democrats

income, tax, gold, present, welfare, taxes, children, men, steel, schools 2.8% 10

interest rates, federal reserve, years ago, money supply, exchange rates, rate, cent, recent 25.7% 11 years, tax rates, inflation population, negro, legislation, recession, strike, businessman, committee, commissions, 1.0% 12 stockholders, sort

controls, prices, oil, food, rationing, freeze, japan, phase, floating, gas 1.8% 13

university, surtax, tv, arthur, paul, bank, start, burns, samuelson, quantity 1.1% 14

gold, taxes, cut, credit, business, payments, increase, poverty, financial, vietnam 2.3% 15

carter, recovery, ford, burns, energy, recession, arthur, japan, germany, stimulus 1.8% 16

vietnam, man, war, marx, galbraith, street, mixed, needed, johnson, book 1.8% 17

wall street, president, growth, good, price, economics, recession, economists, life, stock 12.3% 18

united states, balance payments, economy, world, make, dollar, countries, government, 16.8% 19 budget, country

surcharge, balance, fiscal, commissions, mr, volume, lawyers, currencies, surplus, reform 1.2% 20

government, africa, energy, south, britain, cent, gas, rhodesia, carter, soviet 1.5% 21

Table 2. Topic (LDA) model of the economists’ writing at Newsweek, 1965-1984, set to 22 lexical classes.

Tiago Mata 34 List of figures

Figure 1. Percentage of New York Times articles with terms “economist” “sociologist” “anthropologist” “psychologist”, source: New York Times Chronicle, http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/, accessed 28 July 2015.

Figure 2. Economists on the cover of Time magazine. Panel A. Rexford Tugwell, on 25 June 1934 issue. Panel B. Walter Heller, on March 3, 1961, and C., June 8, 1962 issue. John Kenneth Galbraith, 12 January 1962, not pictured, 16 February 1968 on panel D. Panel E, John Maynard Keynes, on 31 December 1965 issue. Panel F, Milton Friedman, on the issue of 19 December 1969.

Figure 3. Selected Time magazine covers on economic subjects. Panel A. the dollar on 14 December 1970 issue; B. George Shultz and Arthur Burns on 16 August 1971; C. with Adam Smith on 14 July 1975. Panel D with President Gerald Ford and Speaker of the House Carl Albert on 27 January 1975 issue; E, Howard Jarvis on the 19 June 1978 issue. and F, an axe on the issue of 2 March 1981.

Figure 4. Stacked percentages for the topics in the writing of each of the four economists of Newsweek (Henry Wallich, Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman and Lester Thurow), from 1965 to 1984.

Figure 5. Time series with each of the four main topics as a share in the text of each year across all four economists of Newsweek (Henry Wallich, Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman and Lester Thurow), from 1965 to 1984.

Figure 6. Wordcount of terms “economics” and “economist” in the yearly columns of Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson and Henry Wallich, for the years the trio overlapped at Newsweek, from 1966 to 1974.

Tiago Mata 35