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The Topics of Political Economy, a 70 Year Magazine History

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The Topics of Political Economy, a 70 Year Magazine History The Topics of Political Economy, a 70 year magazine history Tiago Mata [email protected] Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London Abstract [c. 200 words]: In the middle decades of the 20th century, when newsmagazines dominated North American print, Newsweek claimed the distinction of hosting the most authoritative commentary on political economy. Newsweek’s columnists were recipients of numerous journalism awards, and two of them received Nobel Prizes in Economics while writing for the magazine. These opinion columns offer a unique vantage point for the study of public economic knowledge. But, how can one read 2,9 million words covering a period of 70 years? Drawing on methods from computational linguistics, I contend that we should examine the topical structure of this corpus. By tracing the birth and death of topics we are able to identify ontological epochs, where the entities of economic life, the subjects of economic science, and the relationships between the two are remade. Word# [10k all incl.]: 9242 December 9, 2014 Work in progress. Please do not cite. The (many) figures of this paper are in colour, please consider to save on printing and to examine them on the screen. Acknowledgments: I am indebted to Claire Lemercier for urging me to consider text analysis in my study of economics in the media. The working paper we co-authored on a subset of the Newsweek corpus was an invaluable education into the statistical methods and the substance of the data. I thank Andrea Salter for research assistance on the processing of the corpus. The research for this paper has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013), ERC grant agreement n. 283754, entitled “Economics in the Public Sphere.” 1 1. Political Economy in culture In the Max Weber lectures of 2011, Wolfgang Streek outlined a synoptic outlook on Wester political economy in the late twentieth century. In this account, “democratic capitalism” is ruled by an endemic conflict between the regimes of resource allocation of the “free play of market forces” and the claims made by collective action and entitlements. Streek interprets the crises of “democratic capitalism”, runaway inflation (late 1960s and 1970s), public deficits (1990s) and excessive private and public debt (late 2000s), through the pull of these two poles, as the summation of attempts to attain social goals without encroaching too deeply onto the domain of property owners and markets.1 Streek’s analysis is genealogically linked to Weber’s classic work in economic sociology, but the proposal is also comparable of many more conceptions of political economy, scholarly and popular. 2 Among economists, one might look to institutionalist economics, the neo- marxist analysis of Social Structures of Accumulation and the regulation school and observe that in all these political economy is defined to encompass a broad domain where any sharp discrimination between the economy and the polity is denied.3 Political economy is a ontologically disputed subject. While no one disputes the existence of interest rates, wages and prices, or the existence of a federal government, federal reserve and a stock exchange, there is elusive agreement about the structures, properties and relationships between these entities. How the ontologies of political economy are made and unmade awaits historical study. 1 Streek “The Crises of Democratic Capitalism.” 2 An overtly political dichotomy is not the only possibility to make political economy intelligible. Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy offer another meta-narrative of markets in culture. In their centuries long view, markets do moral work and shape conditions for subjectivity. In this account the dialectic is expressed in a swing between belief that markets foster social harmony or disharmony. Fourcade and Healy “Moral Views of Market Society.” 3 Aglietta, Régulation et crises du capitalisme; Kotz, Mcdonough, and Reich (ed.) Social Structures of Accumulation; O’Hara, An Institutionalist Review of Long Wave Theories; and again in sociology, Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, Fligstein, Architecture of Markets. 2 The study of the definitions of political economy is challenging and significant because it is not only the domain of the economic and political that is of difficult discrimination but also the distinction between scholarly and popular. Conceptions of political economy seep into the public’s imagination and a concern for political economy permeates print culture. Indeed, the political economy beliefs and understanding of actors are crucial elements in the regulation of late capitalism. The most influential contribution under this heading is Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s revival of Weber’s “spirit of capitalism” to explain sudden regulatory transformations in France from 1960 to 1990. They have argued that values structures in French capitalism foreclosed any resistance to de-regulation by moving from an appreciation of meritocracy, management by objectives and long term planning towards praising mobility, adaptability, and the creating of networks.4 Similarly, Arjun Appadurai has sought to revive Weber’s spirits to trace out the emergence of an American financial imaginary in the 1970s and Americans’ fixation for business news.5 Popular discussions of political economy are light on overt appeals to knowledge. When these address policy error or interpret current affairs, they speak primarily of ignorance of the basic component elements of political economy. The purpose of this essay is to set a new light on discussions about the themes and scope of political economy. I focus my attention on an influential American magazine, Newsweek, that held the distinction of having as its opinion writers some of the most accomplished journalists, pundits and academics in America. I use their writings to take a snapshot of changing conceptions of political economy in the second half of the 20th century. As will become clear, it is a methodological challenge to put into one frame 70 years of analysis. My strategy is to deploy tools from computational linguistics to describe the rise and fall of topics in political economy and through a discussion of their lifecycle draw insights into transformations of political economy in culture. The central question of 4 Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism. 5 Appadurai, “A nation of business junkies” and “The Ghost in the Financial Machine.” 3 this essay is thus what changes to popular discourse about the economy tell us about changing ontologies of political economy? But to answer that question I must first examine how popular discourse about the economy is produced. I begin by explaining why I am focusing on newsmagazines, then I introduce the topic modelling approach, following which I answer my secondary question, as I interrogate what are the primary factors demarcating epochs in political economy. My concluding argument is that we should conceive of political economy as a architecture with components changing at distinct temporalities. We can identify a foundation of a few topics and themes that are unchanged across the 70 years of this study and whose primary concern is human welfare and well being. Alongside these, a few topics track our changing understandings of the functional roles and responsibilities of the state, these topics emerge and disappear slowly, on the scale of decades. Political economy is also about ephemera, but the proportion of subjects that catch analysts attention to then disappear are small. In this study I content that one can identify epochs in the discussions of political economy but contrary to scholarly conceptions that invite us to think of structural transformations triggered by crisis and scandal, the evidence I assemble here is that change in popular political economy is primarily generational. 2. Newsmagazines Popular conceptions of political economy need not match scholarly conceptions. Actors’ beliefs and understandings are likely to be more local and to skew the synoptic perspectives of social scientists. And yet, popular culture has eagerly sought synoptic accounts of capitalism and recruited academics to supply them. Newsmagazines are a particularly appropriate site to examine popular comprehensive conceptions of political economy, since the vocation of these publications is condensation and indexation and interpretation. Newsmagazines were invented in the 1920s as a new sub-genre of digest 4 publications, poised to offer a global and summative perspective on the week’s most significant events. I content that economic analysis has been a crucial component in the success of newsmagazines in post World War II period, and a signature feature of the magazine at the core of this study, Newsweek. Magazines gained national circulation in the United States in the wake of the Civil War thanks in large part to favourable postal legislation, but they only became a dominant genre at the turn of the century.6 Between 1890 and 1905 magazine circulation tripled. A new business model, pioneer by Cyrus Curtis at the Ladies Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post, sold issues below cost and made its profits by advertising, targeting a new national market of consumer goods.7 The digest magazines of this earlier period were Harper’s (since 1850) which published a compendium of periodical publications and some reprints and the Literary Digest (since 1890) clipping news from other publications. It was as challenges to the Literary Digest that newsmagazines emerged, notably by the initiative of two Yale graduates, Henry Luce and Britton Hadden, and a collective of their journalist amateur friends. Both Time magazine (1923) and the Reader’s Digest (1922), set out to reinvent the digest for a more conservative and print saturated age. The popular magazines of pre-1914 addressed their readers as consumers and citizens, pressing concerns for public health, popular science, muckracking and the causes of social justice.8 After 1918 the temper was less militant and Time addressed itself to the “busy men” of the Jazz Age who wanted to stay abreast of a rapidly changing world.
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