The Topics of Political Economy, a 70 Year Magazine History

Home , Henry Wallich, Lester Bernstein, Lester Thurow

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 Please do not cite.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. The weekly magazine was formatted for portability, suited for the urban commute. It had only twenty-eight pages, wherein bite sized news were slotted into twenty pre-assigned departments. The gist of the week’s

6 The most significant aid for national distribution and subscription of magazines and other print were the subside inscribed in the Postal Act of 1879, see Starr, The Creation of the Media. 7 Sumner, The Magazine Century. Wood, Magazines in the United States 8 Schneirov, The Dream of a New Social Order.

5 events could be surveyed in a promised one hour of reading.9 Time was designed for efficiency.

Newsweek’s debts to Time are overt and personal. The first issue of News-week (with an hyphen) was sold on February 17, 1933, the magazine was founded by Thomas J. Cardell Martyn, an Englishman and Oxford graduate, who had arrived in the USA to become foreign affairs editor for Time magazine. Publishers Luce and Hayden hired Martyn by cable, without interview and relying solely on the testimony of friends. Years later, Luce would reflect that it had been “a stupid thing for us to do” since their star hire turned out to have no journalistic experience. In the early days of Time, Martyn was one of only four writers/editors on full time employment and although he proved competent for the task after only two years he left the publication to join the New York Times. For a few years Martyn wrote book reviews, reported on aviation and interpreted European political and military affairs.10 Martyn left as Time was beginning to turn a profit and establishing itself as a model. From the distance of hindsight and a new appreciation for journalism afforded by his New York Times experience, Martyn designed a challenger that adapted Time’s crisp rewrites of the news in a tightly organized thematic structure, but that would be more accurate, deep, and independent, “written in simple, unaffected English” with “a fundamentally sober attitude on all matters involving taste and ethics.”

Martyn was unfortunate with his timing, News-week appeared in the worst year of the Great Depression. A 32-page digest of weekly news for the “busy individual caught up in the turmoil of a bewildered civilization,” was composed of articles that like in Time, were numerous, short, lively and unsigned. 11 The competition with Time and later with US News and World Report, would remain the primordial struggle for the publication. The

9 Elson, et al. Time Inc. 10 Brinkley, The Publisher, pp. 102, 120. 11 The original sections of Newsweek were: Front Page, Home News, Foreign News, Headlines, Sport, Business Science, Aviation, Entertainment, Books, Law, Religion, Forth Estate, Education.Watkins “A letter to News Minded People.”

6 longevity and success of Newsweek can be credited to three major changes in ownership, format and editorial leadership. A feature of all three were changes to the magazine’s political temperament and economic analysis. The most significant change happened at the magazine’s infancy. Four years into publication, Martyn's starting fund was depleted and he sold the magazine. It was merged with Today, another publication failing in the Depression. Malcolm Muir replaced Samuel T. Williamson as editor-in-chief. Muir held a long tenure at the magazine from 1937 to 1961. The hyphen was dropped from the title in the October 4, 1937 issue, and new features were added.12 According to several print historians, it succeeded only as a follower of others. Its sectional schema continued to imitate Time and it offered no more coverage and analysis than that found in the New York Times.13 Newsweek benefitted from the general rise in circulation of all magazines. Between 1950 to 1962 Newsweek’s circulation rose in 80% to a total of 1,5 million copies. However, in one of its features, Newsweek was ahead of the pack. In 1937 it added an opinion column entitled “Business Tides.” While Time, Inc publications occasionally tested running editorials, these were not established within its publications well into the 1940s. Muir arrived at Newsweek after being President of the McGraw-Hill Company. There he was the principal apologist of Business Week, the first imitator of Time bringing the latter’s format to managerial and industrial reporting.14 Muir recruited Business Week’s first editorial writer and staff economist, Virgil Jordan, to write Newsweek’s “Business Tides”. Newsweek’s presentation of opinion was thus distinct from its competitors and inspired by its successful use in business print. The other epoch setting change in Newsweek’s character and personnel happened in 1961 when the title was purchased by the Washington Post group. Osborn Elliott was

12 Sumner “A History of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report.” 13 Elliott The World of Oz; Tebbel & Zuckerman The Magazine in America. 14 Although Business Week had faltered in its early years, Muir insisted that its conception was sound and before he left McGraw-Hill the title began an ascent in circulation and profits that was halted only in the 1980s.

7 placed as editor-in-chief. With the backing of the Washington Post’s newsroom and flush with investment the magazine vied to overtake Time, and even if that prize was never attained, it became the most profitable of the two publications. Newsweek's formula for success rested on its ability to stay current. It had access to the JF Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations and offered sympathetic and extensive coverage of the anti-war and feminist movements. It also changed its economic analysis. In the early 1960s economists were taking the covers of the magazines. Walter Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, was on the cover of Time in March 1961 and June 1962 and the economy headlined other issues like that of March 31, 1963, on “The Rising US Economy.” Newsweek responded first by adding one academic to its roster of opinion writers and ultimately by having three economists writing in rotation from 1966.15 After a decade of stability and achievement, the magazine was in the crisis through most of the 1970s. It was famously the target of a class suit over gender discrimination in 1970.16 From mid-decade it went through five changes in editorial leadership (see figure 1 for a timeline of managing editors). Economic columns however did not change much in this period of turmoil. The age of the economists ended when Richard Smith became editor in 1984, a post he held for 15 years. Under his charge the academics were replaced by journalists. Newsweek’s two economic and consumer columnists, Robert Samuelson and Jane Bryant Quinn, would earn numerous accolades for their reporting and analysis.

*** FIGURE 1 ****

From the 1940s to the 1980s, the newsmagazines were among the most influential titles in American print. Their hegemony was only challenged by a transformation in print culture which favoured specialist publications tailored to specialist interests over the

15 Time did not have prominent economists writing its opinion. Instead it created a “Board of Economists” that it ostensibly advertised as a brain trust for the economic reporting in the magazine. 16 Povich, The Good Girls Revolt.

8 generalist titles. The period of this study 1938 to 2008 captures the ascent and descent of newsmagazines. In addition to their cultural influence newsmagazines are of interest because of their mission to condense, to index, and to interpret the news. Newsmagazines’ columns took on the role of analysing events in ways that were distinct from the position taking editorial of metropolitan newspapers or their occasional explanatory pieces. Like the op-eds that emerged in the 1970s, the columns at the magazines joined opinion with analysis. Of the Big Three, Newsweek merits special attention because of the quality and achievement of its writers (of which more will be said later) and for the centrality that business, economic and financial reporting had in the magazine from very early on. If I successfully established that newsmagazines are an ideal site to examine changing conceptions of political economy, we are now faced by a methodological and practical problem. How are we to make intelligible 70 years of multi-authored, multi-issued writing? In the next section, I introduce some tools to aid us in tracing the themes of political economy.

3. Topics

An increasing number of studies, of variable quality and approach, have looked to economic language as cipher to epochal shifts in governance.17 The studies of economic language nearly always address a single issue or keyword. This essay bears some kinship with this literature to the extent that it too takes a lexical and categorical approach. What is novel to this essay is the use of statistical models developed in computational linguistics to

17One such study, George “On being `competitive’”, counted occurrences of the word “competitive” over 10 year periods at the New York Times. To disambiguate the meaning of competitiveness, the author constructed ratios of counts of the word with a variety of related terms such as “monopoly” or “cooperative”. Another approach has been to code the context in which words occur. In a study of the media construction of the phenomenon of “downsizing,” Hollister “Speaking of Downsizing”, scholars coded 4000 articles as either announcements, company-focused, economy or worker's perspective to gain insight into the dissemination of the concept.

9 study large corpuses in their entirety. The approach of lexical modelling taken by this study, topic modelling, has been deployed in culturomics, and in disciplines such as psychology and political science.18 These methods offer the historian an observational tool. The model identifies sets of co-occurring words in the corpus. The word clusters, or topics, are not theory motivated or expert attributed (as in human coding approaches), but are elicited “bottom up” from patterns in the text. The topics elicited by the statistical model are the elements I will use to draw a picture of longitudinal transformations in popular political economy.

The corpus consists of economic opinion columns running 70 years in a total of 2.9 million words. The typical column is half a page, 800 words or less. Looking at the most common words of the corpus (excluding stopwords) gives us little perspective on how to characterise economic analysis at Newsweek. We find a set of plausible but seemingly trivial terms with “percent” is the most common word, followed by “new”, “money”, “government” and “tax”, all occurring over 6000 times, on average more than once in every column (see figure 2).

***FIGURE 2***

The corpus was organized into yearly documents averaging 40,000 words each (see figure 3) used as inputs for the topic model. There is a rise of nearly 50% in wordcount comparing the period of 1939-1972 and 1984 and beyond, meaning one must take care in comparing those two periods. The columns began in the last third of 1938 and hence record a low word count for that year. Word volumes are stable in the first years and more volatile later. One year, 1984, is anomalous since one author interrupted writing that year, and as a result the number of columns was significantly

18 See in particular the work of Schonhardt-Bailey on policy making. Bailey & Schonhardt-Bailey “Does Deliberation Matter in FOMC Monetary Policymaking?”; Schonhardt-Bailey “The Congressional Debate On Partial-Birth Abortion”; Schonhardt-Bailey “Measuring Ideas More Effectively.”

10 reduced. The corpus was analysed with an algorithm using Latent Dirichlet allocation and Gibbs sampling, as implemented through MALLET.19 I report on a model with 38 topics chosen as offering the most transparent and coherent set of topics compared with alternative specifications (appendix B lists the main words and phrases for each topic).20

***FIGURE 3***

The topic model outputs a description of each document as a composite of classes, so it describes each year’s opinion as a blend of topics. With these scores one can plot the share of each topic longitudinally and examine the prominence of topics, their emergence and demise. 21 The most compelling corroboration that the model produces plausible topics is to examine topics numbered 5 and 0 (respectively graphed in figures 4 and 5).22 The first topic is identified by terms “election, political, democratic, party, economic, republican.” As we can read from figure 3, this topic’s share in the documents tracked election years. We can further observe that only once did the topic take more than 5% of a year’s writing, at the occasion of the 1976 Presidential elections. We might conclude that although tracking the political cycle is a subject of economic commentary, it is not a prominent concern. Similarly, the topic plotted in figure 5 is characterised by terms such as “Saudi Arabia, oil prices, energy, recession.” We can observe its emergence in 1973, timed to the

19 McCallum, “MALLET”. 20 After examining the plausibility of the content of topics and their distribution across time with models with 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 50, 100, and 150 topics, I elected to experiment around the 40 topics count. I again ran models for 36, 38, 40, and 42 topics, and finally settled on 38 since it covered the full corpus with good maximum likelihood scores and increasing the number of topics no longer improved the fit significantly. See Griffiths & Steyvers, 2004. “Finding scientific topics” for a discussion of how to use and evaluate topic modelling. 21 As done by Robert Nelson in Mining the Dispatch: http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/pages/home. 22 Another output that confirms the suitable fit of the model, is that tables that occasionally appear in the columns have been classed under one topic, numbered 24.

11 first oil embargo, as well as the topic’s continued presence throughout the 1970s. We can also note its resurgence in the 2000s when again the price of oil became a subject of public anxiety and of economic interpretation.

***FIGURE 4***

***FIGURE 5***

The topic model identifies several topics that record events and pointed discussions that emerge and perish in a few years (see figure 6). That group of topics is fenced on one end by discussions on the subject of the lingering Great Depression and on the other by the tech bubble and the current financial crisis.

***FIGURE 6***

The sixteen topics, out of a total of 38, described and plotted in figures 4-6 represent only a small part of the corpus. Their volume is small and in they are associated with a lexicon that is appropriate to specific current affairs. Other topics exhibit greater permanence and volume and I will use these as markers to examine changes to the political economy.

4. Political Economy framed

The distribution of topics by year allows the construction of a picture of change, figure 7. The picture conceals a number of judgments and decisions. First, there is choice and judgment in the total number of topics chosen for the model, 38. Second, to make the

12 picture intelligible I eliminated all small topics, the ephemera pictured in figure 6, as well as topics 4 (on currency exchange), 31 (on taxes) and 35 (on Wall Street) that were small in variance and volume. The topics of figure 7 represent 84% of the corpus, so in eliminating the smallest topics we have a loss of only 16%. That loss is biased to the later periods where ephemeral topics were concentrated, but by re-indexing the remaining topics that bias is not apparent. I draw figure 7 to visually identify breakpoints. I content that these are observable in 1946, 1958, 1964, 1977-8, 1984 and 2000. The periods delimited by these dates have a distinctive composition of topics.

*** FIGURE 7 ***

The first discernible topic epoch are the war years. As figure 8 records, the dominant topics are preoccupied with “cost of living, war production” and “purchasing power, world war”. The columns were thus busy at examining the costs of the war effort to the American citizenry and to the nation’s financial status. In 1945 we observe the emergence of a self-explanatory topic identified by terms “Truman” and “Marshall Plan”. One of the three war topics repeats over the years although it is always minor in volume. Interestingly, in the late 1960s we see emergence of another war related topic that is independent in its language and issues from the 1939-1945 ones, that topic addresses the Vietnam war. I will pay no further attention to the war topics, and indeed in the composite picture (again figure 7) I joined them into a single topic/colour. I am more interested in the analysis of the postwar period. I briefly describe the character of those periods next, and examine them in greater detail in the following section.

*** FIGURE 8 ***

The period from 1945-6 to 1957-8 witnesses the replacement of the war subjects by two topics. The largest is preoccupied with national policy and has as identifying terms: “federal reserve, federal government, money supply, price control” (25 in figure 7), the other, growing in importance, addresses international matters and has as key terms “foreign aid, Eisenhower, fiscal year, discount rate” (# 20). In the wake of a sharp and unsustained rise in discussions around “purchasing power, wage rates, profit margins, unemployment insurance” in 1956-8 (#22), the international discussion begins to change language from 1960. The new key terms are “balance of payments, deficit, confidence, dollar” (# 37).

The threshold of 1964 is more stark than 1958. The topics that characterized the earlier period disappear and are replaced by three topics defined by discussions around “interest rate, annual rate, year, money” (# 16), “social security, white house, state local, low cost” (# 34) and “monetary growth, price controls, inflation” (# 23). From 1978, a topic that had emerged in 1964 becomes vastly more important, identified by terms “mutual funds, life insurance, term bonds” (# 15) and between 1978 and 1984 a topic with key terms “companies, market, investors, states, debt” (# 29) emerges and gains importance. Thus the topics of this middle period are focused on money values and policy from the perspective of the state and the investor.

The 1984 is also clearly discernible, two topics emerge characterised by “health care, wal-mart, nest egg, plans, retirement” (# 32) and “baby boomers, budget, spending, stocks, benefits” (# 19), and one gains in importance “Europe, growth, college, job, world” (#12). Equally stark is the disappearance of the topic emerging in 1964 on “monetary growth, price controls, inflation” (#23). Finally, in 2000, we have a change that in make up that is like that of 1958. It is not a change of topics as much as a change in rank. Discussions of “health care, plans, retirement” (# 32) gain in importance over discussions of “companies,

14 market, investors” (#29). A summary of my description of the topical epochs post 1946 is offered by table 1.

*** TABLE 1 ***

The critical turning points of 1946, 1964 and 1978 and 1984 all match changes to the authorship of the Newsweek columns, as illustrated in the timeline of figure 9. Authorship is thus the foremost explanatory factor for the changing composition of topics. The evidence, in biographies and archives of personal papers, is that editors at Newsweek did not steer the columnists.23 However, editorial turnover may explain the anomaly of the year of 1984, and the decision to replace the academic economists by one journalism, Robert Samuelson, the timings of editorial renewal do not match the patterns of the topics. The insight that topical epochs are demarcated by changes in authorship invites us to describe the character of those epochs in connection to its authors.

*** FIGURE 9 ***

5. Generations and authors

Does each author have an identifiable vocabulary and style? Looking at the most common words by author the answer appears to be no (see table 2). Despite small differences, looking at the top five most common words is no aid to distinguish the authors. And yet, the topic model recorded striking differences, in the words and themes of economic analysis between authors/periods. In this section, I introduce the authors of the columns

23 Elliott The World of Oz; Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People.

15 and connect their biography to changes in the topical profile.

The first columnist of Newsweek was Virgil Jordan, the original editorial writer for Business Week and then an economist at the National Industrial Conference Board. Jordan left Business Week to the head of NICB, and it was during that tenure that he moonlighted as columnist for Newsweek. Jordan wrote only a few columns in 1938 before the role was handed to Ralph Robey, an economist with a doctorate from Columbia University who had a career between banking, teaching and the publishing industry. Robey had been a financial editor at the New York Post and editor at the Washington Post before joining Newsweek as associate editor in 1937, and a year later becoming its columnist. In 1946, Robey left the magazine to become chief economist at the National Association of Manufacturers.24 Newsweek’s first two columnists had careers in industrial associativism and followed those organizations interwar efforts to raise the public profile of business, and in the late 1930s, to battle the New Deal.

For the summer of 1946, a few columns were penned by John Willis Love, but Robey’s long term replacement was Henry Hazlitt, a former staffer at the Wall Street Journal, and writer at the New York Evening Mail and the New York Sun. In the twelve years prior to joining Newsweek, Hazlitt was an editorial writer for the New York Times. Unlike his predecessors, Hazlitt kept company with scholars and intellectuals and was one of the founding members of the Mount Perelin Society. He was a forceful advocate of liberalism and entrepreneurial in the movement’s publishing and education ventures. He was a supporter of the Foundation for Economic Education, an organization that spread the views of Ludwig von Mises and of other members of the “Austrian school of economics”, and he acted as an agent to Friedrich Hayek, brokering the serialization of the Road to Serfdom at Readers’ Digest.25

During his nearly two decade tenure at Newsweek, Hazlitt was alone as columnist

24 “Dr. Ralph Robey Economist, Dies.” The New York Times. 25 Boettke and Palagashvili “Henry Hazlitt as an Intellectual Middleman.”

16 and thus the distinctive topics of 1946 to 1964 are distinctive to him too. The most striking change in this period is the trading in importance, c.1958-60, of topics addressing international affairs. In 1955-7, as much as 20% of all of Hazlitt’s writing addressed “foreign aid” (# 20). A representative excerpt from this period is:

“Originally urged by Secretary Marshall in 1947, to meet what was then regarded as a temporary emergency situation, foreign aid has gone on and on, from year to year, constantly changing its stated purposes, constantly changing its name, but showing not the slightest tendency to terminate or even taper off.” (“Foreign Aid Forever”, 1955). Hazlitt’s columns follow foreign policy and geopolitics and repeat a common refrain that foreign aid as cause of the budget deficit. Hazlitt calls insistently for a reappraisal of “foreign economic policy”. By contrast, in 1961-5, another internationally minded topic is claiming nearly 15% of all of Hazlitt’s writing (# 37). An excerpt that helps make sense of this topic is:

“What we are primarily suffering from is not a “balance of payments” crisis but an inflation crisis. Confidence in the dollar has not fallen because of a “deficit” in the balance of payments, but there is a “deficit” in the balance of payments because of our inflation. The cure, therefore, is not to try to tinker directly with the balance of payments but to halt the inflation.” (“What is to be done?”, 1961)

The two topics address different problems, one worries about the federal budget deficit, the other about the balance of payments, and a rush to withdraw gold from America. In the first instance, international politics weighted on home economics, in the other, it is home political (wage inflation) that is hurting international economics. Discussions about balance of payments and currency exchange continued past Hazlitt’s retirement, but these issues are increasingly addressed in a different topic (# 4), which in the period of 1967-73 accounts for over 5% of all content (see figure 10). A representative quote from that topic is:

“The collapse of the dollar in European currency markets has been a traumatic experience. Its meaning is simple. The world is now without a workable monetary

17 system.” (The Ailing Dollar, 1973). In those years, the balance of payment crisis developed into a breakdown of the system of international payments created at the Bretton Woods conference. The slow movement from one topic to the next tracks a slow and begrudging awareness of the crumbling of the Bretton Woods system.

*** FIGURE 10 ****

The economists joined Newsweek in 1964-5 by initiative of Osborne Elliott, the managing editor. From 11 January 1965, Henry Wallich was added as an alternate to 71 year old Hazlitt. While Hazlitt was a self-taught economist, Wallich had been a member of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Eisenhower administration and was a Professor at Yale University.26 Wallich soon convinced Elliott to add two other academic economists to the business pages, Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman. Both were former advisors to Presidential candidates: Samuelson to J. F. Kennedy in 1960, Friedman to Barry Goldwater in 1964. The magazine introduced, in 12 September 1965, Friedman as “a leading conservative economic thinker” and Samuelson as “one of the nation's leading liberal economists.” With both extremes of the political spectrum spoken for, Wallich occupied the center. As he put it: “I'm in the middle.” Wallich left the publication in 1974 to join the Federal Reserve Board.

The agonistic expectations, that fellow economists should do ideological battle, were uncomfortable to the pair taking the two extremes. When in 1970, Samuelson received the second Bank of Sweden’s Nobel Memorial Prize winner in Economic Sciences,27 it fell to Friedman to signal the occasion (they were on a third week rotation)

26 Hazlitt, Henry, 1966. “Parting Words” Newsweek, September 12. 27 The acclaim that greeted Samuelson and Friedman’s careers began much earlier. Samuelson was in 1947

18 with the toast 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.[...] Disagreement among economists on public policy seldom reflects a difference in economic analysis proper but rather in judgment about quantitative magnitude, goals to be pursued, or the time span to be considered, or political considerations outside economics.

Six years later, Friedman too received the Bank of Sweden prize and Samuelson returned the compliment, honouring his magazine colleague as “an economist’s economist” and adding that he and I, 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.

I reproduce these pleasantries because they set out a claim deserving of further examination in this essay. Were the writings of Friedman and Samuelson distinct? Although the topic profile identifies breaks when the panel of authors change, it remains possible that the primary cause of change is generational and not an outcome of the individual style of each author. Studying only the writings of Friedman and Samuelson, I re-ran the topic model for only 15 topics, to construct figure 11. We see that the same two topics cover 66% of all of Friedman’s writings and 77% of Samuelson’s, two thirds of their writing is therefore overlapping in subject matter. A topic formed of words “interest rates, federal reserve, years ago, united states, inflation, cent, tax, price, money, growth” makes up 60% of all of Friedman’s content, as well as 40% of Samuelson’s. Another topic, Samuelson’s second most prevalent, and Friedman’s third is identified by terms, “wall street, good, economic,

the first John Bates Clark medalist, an award given to the economist under the age of 40 that has made the “most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.” Friedman won the medal 4 years later.

19 president, economics, american, year, nixon, recession, real.” Friedman’s second most prevalent topic, identified by terms “government spending, monetary, fed, taxes, effect, income, higher, amount, quantity, major” is of small importance for Samuelson. By comparison Samuelson also addressed a greater variety of topics. In sum, the two authors overwhelming overlapped in topics, and the only remarkable difference is Samuelson’s interest in connecting the “real economy” with the stock market, while Friedman persisted in tracking the movements of economic, primarily monetary aggregates.

**** FIGURE 11 ****

Expanding the view to include all three economists, and thus returning to the full topic model, three topics characterise the economists’ epoch and its zeal for policy debates. One focuses on “federal policy” broadly defined, another addresses “monetary growth” and finally another deals with “social security”. The last of these I will reserve for discussion in a later section, for the moment I concentrate on the first two topics. As we can see from figure 12, Hazlitt’s dominant policy topic (# 25) is greatly reduced albeit never disappears, similarly a minor topic during the 1950s (# 16) rises in importance, as early as 1964, when Wallich is paired with Hazlitt. Finally, a topic (# 23) appears and disappears between 1965 and 1984, exactly matching Friedman’s tenure at the magazine.

**** FIGURE 12 ****

An example of the dwindling policy topic is:

The chief cause for the increase in the volume of money and credit all through this period was the government’s own cheap-money policy, maintained mainly through

20 the device of pegging outstanding government bonds above par. (“Inflation is Government-Made”, 1951) Whilst an example of the rising policy topic is:

Housing starts should trend upward as interest rates continue to subside a little. Weak inventory rebuilding appears likely. The boom in fixed- investment spending on plant and equipment is finally over, but recent soundings on capital appropriations do not suggest, any substantial decline in total dollar spending. (“Good Times Coming”, 1970)

The two quotes highlight a change in problematics. Whilst the first topic is about government policy’s impact on interest rates and prices, the latter one takes the movements in interest rates as given, as historical or expected, and examines (or foretells) their consequences to the economy. The earlier policy topic concerned with government action is closest to Friedman’s policy topic, that watched over the growth of the money supply and the actions of the (short-handed) Fed.

From 1978 Newsweek added a column on consumer affairs. The only woman in the Newsweek writers, Jane Bryant Quinn apprenticed writing for McGraw-Hill’s consumer newsletter, “Personal Finance Letter” and in the year she joined Newsweek she also published Everyone’s Money Book.28 Quinn volunteered personal finance advice and looked to policy to question its consequences for the pocketbook. She expanded on a preoccupation established earlier, but her attention to the movements in financial assets and credit was distinctly didactic and practical. The analysis of the pros and cons of different financial instruments, such as "mutual funds, life insurance" (#15) increases greatly over this period and was by far the most important subject in her prolific writing.

With Wallich’s departure in 1974, Samuelson and Friedman wrote alternating columns until 1981 when Lester Thurow replaced Samuelson. A colleague of Samuelson's

28 Jane Bryant Quinn won three National Press Club Consumer Journalism Awards (1981,1982, 1984), an Emmy Award for Coverage of News on TV in 1985, the John Hancock Award for Excellence in Business and Financial Journalism in 1992 and 1995, and one Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997.

21 at MIT, Thurow had a Harvard doctoral degree in Economics and was the author of a popular book of 1981, The Zero-Sum Society. But the Thurow and Friedman pair lasted for only three years and in 1984 Robert Samuelson (no relation to Paul) joined Newsweek to replace the two academics.29 Samuelson was a 1967 graduate of Harvard University with a B.A. in government, who began his journalism career as a reporter on The Washington Post's Business Desk. After four years he left the paper to freelance, and was hired by The National Journal as an economics correspondent in 1976, writing its "Economic Focus" column.30 Newsweek would again have two economic opinion writers in 2006 when Daniel Gross joined Samuelson.

Robert Samuelson’s replacement of the economists reaffirmed the move towards addressing readers as consumers (see figure 13). Two distinctive topics of post-1984, one centred on “baby boomers (#19)” and another on “companies”(#29), are captured by the following quotes:

OK, BABY BOOMERS. HERE'S WHAT THE PRUDENCE police think you ought to be buying next. Long-term-care (LTC) insurance, to cradle your weary bones when you're 85. (“Aging: the endgame”, 1996) Under the various budget plans, about half the required spending cuts would have to be made by future Congresses. And even if these cuts occur, Congress hasn't faced the broader issues raised by the retirement of baby boomers in the next century. If nothing happens, spending for the elderly will explode, as will budget deficits or taxes. (“Call it a flaky tax”, 1996)

If Enron taught us anything, it is that a company's financial statements don't always reflect--as they should--its financial condition. In theory, profits are simple:

29 “Joining NEWSWEEK as a contributing editor is Robert J. Samuelson” Newsweek, February 20, 1984, p. 64. 30 Robert Samuelson has earned many journalism awards, including in 1993 the John Hancock Award for Best Business and Financial Columnist and the Gerald Loeb Award for Best Commentary. Samuelson earned the National Headliner Award for Feature Column on a Single Subject in both 1992 and 1993. He received another National Headliner Award in 1987 for Best Special Interest Column, and the Gerald Loeb Award for Commentary in 1986. He was named a Loeb finalist in 1988 for his columns on the October 1987 Wall Street crash. Before coming to Newsweek, Samuelson also won a 1981 National Magazine Award and a 1983 Loeb Award.

22 revenues (generally, sales) minus costs (labor, material, overhead) equals profits. In practice, complexities arise. (“The Recovery’s Soft Underbelly, 2002)

The quotes are invaluable to interpret the topics’ keywords. The attention given to “baby boomers” reflects an enduring anxiety about both the prospects for retirement of America’s most famous generation but also its consequences to the fiscal state. The final topic is harder to grasp but it seems to record doubts about the transparency of financial dealings particularly in the wake of the dot.com bust.

*** FIGURE 13 ****

Finally, and as noted before, the topics of ephemera were concentrated in the 1950s and in particular in the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s. This signals the temperament and attention of journalists, by contrast to the academic economists of an earlier period, to current controversies and it highlights that these were covered in distinctive language as opposed to being folded into the terms of long established topics.

The core claim of my analysis of the topic profile is that authorship matters, but that individual authors might not. The topics that appear and disappear to mark an epoch are often not the doing of a single author (although Friedman has its peculiar take, and so does Quinn). The evidence from the period of 1965-78 and from 1984 onwards is that topics change by generation more so than by authorship.

6. On the Architecture of Political Economy

While authorship and generation shape the language of political economy, it is equally evident that the world is not remade every 20 years. Perhaps the most striking finding of

23 this study is that some things don’t change, whilst others change only slowly. To make this point I zoom in on three topics that deal with personal income, represented in Figure 14 represents. One topic is stable throughout the seventy years (#1), averaging just below 10% post war. It is the restoration of free markets and free trade that will do most to increase world production, raise living standards, and promote peace. (“Toward State Managed Cartels”, 1949) These unhappy trends may dog George Bush. He inherits a prosperity that, while popular, seems unsatisfying because the rise in living standards is so sluggish. (“Beyond the Budget Fuss” 1988)

Whatever the discussion might, or the age, or epoch, a concern for personal income, and quality of life remains a centrepiece of political economy, and the language and terms it elicits is often the same. By contrast two topics trade places in the 1960s. One is identified by the term “purchasing power” (#22) and declines. This seems paradoxical since living standards and purchasing power are not so different at first glance. A quote can elucidate the difference, as in the excerpt

The worst of all remedies for the recession is that proposed by Walter Reuther and the AFL-CIO. It is a further increase in wage rates to “increase purchasing power.” As I pointed out here last week, a further increase above present peak wage rates would simply increase costs of production, squeeze out more profit margins, price more goods and more labor out of the market, increase unemployment still more, reduce payrolls, reduce labor’s total income, and turn recession into real depression. (“Hair of the Dog”, 1958)

Hazlitt deploys “purchasing power” in a pejorative sense, as the intrusion of government policy trying to perk up economic activity, it is an artificial and ultimately doomed form of raising living standards. The other topic (#34) rises in importance and its key term is “social security.” The topic encompasses Milton Friedman’s campaign against social welfare programs as undermining the values of philanthropy and family but also Quinn’s

24 watchful arithmetic of the program’s costs and benefits. What changes in the background and is that debates over the economic functions of social provisioning (along Keynesian lines) disappear once social security becomes established and becomes a civic entitlement. Political economy will still address it but in terms that either take it from granted or that challenge social security’s intergenerational fairness.

***FIGURE 14***

The conceptions of political economy mentioned in the opening lines of this essay posit epochal change as born of crisis. The ontology of political economy, taken in this study to be its key terms and themes, is in mismatch with these accounts, in both their expectation of crisp turning points and in changes to the core foci of political economy, for instance moving from concerns over labour disputes to currency worries and on to debt panics. Crises did not seem to trigger new ways of reading and writing on the economy, on politics and on their integration. Instead popular political economy is best characterized as a mixture of concerns changing at different paces and at the behest of different factors: the functions and roles of the state (social security example above), the cultures of print (personal finance becoming part of newsmagazines), the credibility of economic science (the arrival of the economists and their eventual departure).31 Epochal changes in this data only became visible once we cleared our sight from the ephemera and paid special attention to the middling topics. Once we did that, we found that the sharpest differences were generational, when a new set of authors took to writing political economy from a renewed perspective. Popular political economy progresses by retirement.

31 On changes to the public credibility of economists, see Mata and Medema, “Cultures of Expertise”.

25 References

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26 Gravitas And Moral Passion,” British Journal of Political Science, 38, 383-410. Schonhardt-Bailey, Sheryl, 2005. “Measuring Ideas More Effectively: An Analysis of Bush and Kerry’s National Security Speeches,” PS: Political Science and Politics, XXXVIII-4, 701-711. Schneirov, M., 1994. The Dream of a New Social Order: Popular Magazines in America, 1893-1914, Columbia University Press. Skocpol, T., 1979. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China, Cambridge University Press. Starr, P., 2005. The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, Basic Books. Streek, W., 2011. The Crises of Democratic Capitalism. New Left Review, 71, pp.5–29. Sumner, D.E., 2010. The Magazine Century: American Magazines Since 1900, Peter Lang. Sumner, D.E., 2003. A History of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. Encyclopedia of International Media and Communication. Tebbel, J. & Zuckerman, M.E., 1991. The Magazine in America, 1741-1990 1st ed., Oxford University Press, USA. Watkins, Julian L. 1933. “A letter to News Minded People” News-Week, March 18, p. 33. Wood, J.P., 1971. Magazines in the United States, Ronald Press.

27 Pictures and tables

Figure 1. Timeline of Newsweek editors. Samuel T. Williamson (1933-1937; not in picture), Malcolm Muir (1937-1961), Osborne Elliot (1961-1969 and 1972-1975), Ed Kosner (1969-1972), Lester Bernstein (1975-1982), William Broyles (1982-1984), Richard Smith (1984-1998), Mark Whitaker (1998 – 2006), Jon Meacham (2006-2010).

Figure 2. Most frequent words scaled by their ranking (see Appendix A for word counts).

Figure 3. Wordcount by year. Note the anomaly in 1984 when one of the columnists (Jane Bryant Quinn) did not write.

Figure 4. Share of topic 5 on yearly corpus. Identifying terms of topic are "election, political, democratic, party, republican."

Figure 5. Share of topic 0 on yearly corpus. Identifying terms of topic are “saudi arabia, oil, prices, energy, recession.”

Figure 6. Ephemeral topics that are localized to a few years, for instance topic 27 identified by "steel strike, compulsory arbitration, collective bargaining"; 18 by "health care, insurance, clinton"; and 10 by "stocks, bush, people, internet."

Figure 7. Composite picture of classes by year, excluding classes with low variance and share in the corpus, topics on war aggregated into one class, indexed to 100.

Figure 8. Classes relating to war and production. Topic 2 identified by "cost living, postwar period, war production", 9 by "truman, marshall plan", 36 by "... vietnam", and 30 "point view, world war, purchasing power." Panel A, frequence, B yearly share.

Figure 9. Timeline of authors writing columns on economic and financial affairs, 1938-2008.

Figure 10. International affairs. Topic 4 identified by "dollar, world, countries", 20 by "foreign aid" and 37 by "balance of payments, deficit, foreign aid." Panel A, frequence, B yearly share.

Figure 11. Comparing Friedman and Samuelson on topics (note that the numbered topics are the output of a separate topic model only for Friedman’s and Samuelson’s texts).

Figure 12. Writing Policy in the mid- 20th century. Topic 16 on "interest rate" contrasted with topic 23 identified by terms "monetary growth, cent, price controls" and 25 identified by "federal reserve, federal government, money supply, price control". Panel A, frequence, B wordcount

Figure 13. Classes relating to consumer finance. Topic 15 identified by "mutual funds, life insurance", 19 by "baby boomers, budget, stocks", 29 by "companies, market, investors", 32 by "health care, wal mart, nest egg." Panel A, frequence, B yearly share in wordcount.

Figure 14. Topics that are represented evenly in multiple years, percentage of yearly corpus. Topic 1 is identified by terms "living standards, supreme court, free market", 22 by "purchasing power, wage rates" and 34 by "social security, white house."

Table 1. Review of changes to topics, post -1946. Periods Topics Emerging Growing Disappearing Decreasing “federal reserve, federal government, “foreign aid, Eisenhower, War War money supply, price control” [#25] fiscal year, discount rate” 1946- “foreign aid, Eisenhower” [#20] [#20] 1956 “balance of payments, deficit, confidence, dollar [#37] “purchasing power, wages, “foreign aid, Eisenhower, fiscal profits, unemployment year, discount rate” [#20] 1957- insurance” [#22] 1964 “balance of payments, deficit, confidence, dollar [#37] “monetary growth, price controls, “interest rate, annual rate, “foreign aid, Eisenhower” [#20] “federal reserve, federal inflation” [#23] year, money” [#16] “balance of payments, deficit, government, money supply, price 1965- “mutual funds, life insurance” [#15] “social security, white house, confidence, dollar [#37] control” [#25] 1978 “Europe, growth, college, job, world” state, local, cost” [#34] [#12] 1978- “companies, markets, investors, states, “mutual funds, life “monetary growth, price controls, 1984 debt” [#29] insurance” [#15] inflation” [#23] “health care, wal-mart, nest egg, plans, “Europe, growth, college, “monetary growth, price controls, 1984- retirement” [#32] job, world” [#12] inflation” [#23] 2000 “baby boomers, budget, spending, stocks, benefits” [#19] 2001- “health care, wal-mart, nest egg, “companies, markets, investors, 2008 plans, retirement” [#32] states, debt” [#29]

V. Jordan business economic political new markets

R. Robey war government business production

Love price prices new production goods

H. Hazlitt government percent inflation new

Wallich inflation tax economy cent money

P.Samuelson cent inflation new economic year

Friedman inflation government cent monetary tax

Thurow American economic economy percent tax

Quinn cent inflation new economic year

R. Samuelson percent economic new economy government

D. Gross percent new says like economy

Table 2. Most common words by author.

43 Appendix A. Most common words in full corpus.

percent 10,988 new 7,179 money 6,968 government 6,519 tax 6,480 year 5,534 inflation 5,522 economic 5,049 years 4,941 prices 4,538 price 4,424 says 4,262 rates 4,194 people 4,065 income 3,946 market 3,684 time 3,644 interest 3,580 rate 3,531 pay 3,430 billion 3,404 economy 3,404 funds 3,385 make 3,295 federal 3,269 spending 3,223 business 3,207 just 3,097 president 3,093 taxes 3,008 it's 2,977 higher 2,943 world 2,906 cent 2,900 increase 2,793 growth 2,761 good 2,745 stocks 2,737 like 2,719 american 2,693 u.s 2,615 congress 2,596 war 2,590 policy 2,561 way 2,559 investment 2,529 budget 2,465 credit 2,374 buy 2,353

44 Appendix B. Topic key.

#0 – words: 14803 - "saudi arabia, oil prices, energy, recession, gas, spending, gasoline, depression, domestic, run" #1 – words: 113113 - "living standards, supreme court, free market, standard living, corporate profits, economic, living costs, american economy, american people, long" #2 – words: 21188 - "cost living, postwar period, war production, cent, labor, mr, wages, problem, year, public" #3 – words: 8502 - "inflation, high, market, japanese, gold, investors, interest, land, industry, higher" #4 – words: 27914 - "dollar, world, countries, exchange, international, economy, foreign, trade, poor, currency" #5 – words: 13042 - "election, political, democratic, party, economic, republican, vote, campaign, people, income" #6 – words: 21411 - "business, market, defense, production, year, gold, cent, trend, index, recovery" #7 – words: 4512 - "social security, clinton, pension, dole, credit, republicans, cpi, balanced, lawyers, bankruptcy" #8 – words: 5774 - "war, students, insurance, japan, soviet, military, gulf, japanese, ll, loans" #9 – words: 21583 - "mr truman, marshall plan, exchange control, western europe, rent control, price control, production, european, free, british" #10 – words: 12822- "stocks, bush, people, internet, economy, funds, medicare, prices, money, war" #11 – words: 5324 - "europe, global, medicare, clinton, countries, japan, china, deregulation, laws, amtrak" #12 – words: 26556 - "europe, growth, political, college, job, school, world, problems, standards, create" #13 – words: 12919 - "interest rates, pension, ira, percent, money, companies, plans, irs, security, company" #14 – words: 9748 - "child care, bush, companies, national, children, credit, productivity, japanese, dollar, billion" #15 – words: 123996 - "mutual funds, life insurance, term bonds, company stock, bond funds, home equity, merrill lynch, money, consulting firm, credit card" #16 – words: 90602 - "interest rate, interest rates, annual rate, rate interest, year, money, federal, time, good, large" #17 – words: 9307 - "financial, credit, subprime, global, paulson, mortgage, bush, loans, obama, mortgages" #18 – words: 9546 - "health care, insurance, clinton, coverage, growth, costs, life, spending, policy, japan" #19 – words: 26774 - "baby boomers, budget, spending, stocks, benefits, programs, retirement, ll, cuts, highlight" #20 – words: 33205 - "foreign aid, mr eisenhower, fiscal year, discount rate, taft hartley, aid program, spending, president, expenditures, farm" #21 – words: 123621 - "day day, president, prices, make, policy, great, today, result, industry, effect" #22 – words: 39693 - "purchasing power, wage rates, profit margins, unemployment insurance, labor, economic, years, wages, billion, period" #23 – words: 21726 - "monetary growth, cent cent, price controls, inflation, gold, fed, nixon, rates, gnp, economists" #24 – words: 51506 - "percent percent, percent annually, compared percent, rose percent, dropped percent, million million, billion billion, south korea, rates percent, percent compared percent"> #25 – words: 84070 - "federal reserve, federal government, money supply, price control, money credit, supply demand, government securities, wage increases, price increases, inflation" #26 – words: 8868 - "cent, inflation, estate, reagan, term, ll, spouse, property, carter, bonds" #27 – words: 14518 - "steel strike, compulsory arbitration, collective bargaining, union, labor, unions, act, law, wage, strikes" #28 – words: 8192 - "south africa, cent, carter, recovery, ford, unemployment, government, growth, burns,

45 spending" #29 – words: 58667 - "companies, don, market, investors, states, debt, doesn, business, isn, stocks" #30 – words: 95138 - "point view, world war, purchasing power, months ago, buying power, time, program, government, present, case" #31 – words: 45146 - "income tax, tax cut, income taxes, tax cuts, capital gains, taxable income, tax rates, capital gains tax, investment tax, tax brackets" #32 – words: 27548 - "health care, wal mart, nest egg, ll, plans, retirement, china, global, prices, inflation" #33 – words: 7938 - "social security, stock, people, clinton, roth, account, financial, accounts, stocks, ira" #34 – words: 88582 - "social security, white house, state local, low cost, government, people, good, years, work, change" #35 – words: 20841 - "wall street, economy, markets, banks, fed, world, health, past, housing, news" #36 – words: 11832 - "wall street, cent, spending, men, vietnam, fiscal, fed, recession, present, johnson" #37 – words: 22618 - "balance payments, billion billion, deficit billion, confidence dollar, foreign aid, gold, growth, kennedy, deficits, years"