Doctoral Dissertation Research: Inventing the Notion of the Economy

1930年以前，经济学家们对市场、贸易、不平等等进行了理论化和计量，但没有将这些对象捆绑在一起，形成一个统一的整体，称为“经济”。“这篇论文研究了为什么经济在20世纪30年代出现，为什么它采取了特殊的形状。使用档案研究和计算技术分析文本，它认为，生产的官方，例行，及时的宏观经济统计数据将经济生活的模糊概念空间转化为一个具体的，有界的对象，“经济”在20世纪30年代和40年代。1950年代和1960年代国民收入统计的标准化和传播使“经济”全球化，到1970年，每个国家都被认为有一个经济体。由于这些经济体都是以同样的方式衡量的，因此可以很容易地比较它们的规模，从而得出发展和增长的结论。国民收入统计关注的是经济增长，而不是收入和财富的不平等，这导致学者和政策制定者忽视了日益严重的不平等，即使对贫困的兴趣也在增长。学术成就学者们一直认为科学实践构建对象，但这一传统的大多数工作集中在自然科学和医学上。与自然科学不同的是，社会科学经常用行政数据来构建它们的对象，因此可用的信息已经被解释和分类。对经济学家如何构建“经济”的研究应该为社会科学如何塑造世界的过程提供更广泛的见解。更广泛的影响为什么每一美元都应该是一样的，无论是花在治疗疾病、清理污染还是制造炸弹上？本文探讨了美国是如何对这一问题做出一个特定的回答的，以及为什么学者和其他人仍然在争论这个问题。在关于GDP的正确测量的争论背后，是关于什么应该被重视的伦理问题和关于经济本身性质的基本问题。

IntroductionBefore 1930, economists theorized and measured markets, trade, inequality, and more, but did not bundle these objects together into a unified whole named "the economy." This dissertation investigates why the economy emerged in the 1930s and why it took the particular shape it did. Using archival research and computational techniques for analyzing text, it argues that the production of official, routine, timely macroeconomic statistics transformed the fuzzy conceptual space of economic life into a concrete, bounded object, "the economy" in the 1930s and 1940s. The standardization and diffusion of national income statistics in the 1950s and 1960s globalized "the economy," such that by 1970 every country was understood to have an economy. Since these economies were all measured the same way, their size could then be easily compared to make claims about development and growth. National income statistics focused attention on economic growth, and away from income and wealth inequality, which contributed to academics and policymakers overlooking increasing inequality even as interest in poverty grew.Intellectual MeritScholars have long argued that scientific practices construct objects, but most work in this tradition focuses on the natural sciences and medicine. Unlike the natural sciences, social sciences often build their objects with administrative data, and thus the information available is already interpreted and categorized. This investigation of how economists constructed "the economy" should provide broader insight into the process of how social sciences shape the world.Broader ImpactsWhy should every dollar count the same, whether it is spent on treating illness, cleaning up pollution or building bombs? This dissertation explores how the US settled on one particular answer to that question, and why scholars and others are still arguing about it. Behind debates over the proper measurement of Gross Domestic Product are ethical questions about what is to be valued and fundamental questions about the nature of the economy itself.