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

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"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.
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