Doctoral Dissertation Research: Inventing the Notion of the Economy

在1930年之前，经济学家对市场、贸易、不平等等进行了理论和测量，但并没有把这些东西捆绑在一起，形成一个统一的整体，称为“经济”。这篇论文探讨了经济为什么在20世纪30年代出现，以及为什么它会呈现出这样的特殊形态。它利用档案研究和计算技术分析文本，认为官方的、例行公事的、及时的宏观经济统计数据的产生，在20世纪30年代和40年代将经济生活的模糊概念空间转变为具体的、有界的对象--经济。20世纪50年代和60年代国民收入统计的标准化和扩散使“经济”全球化，到1970年，每个国家都被理解为拥有经济。由于这些经济体都是以相同的方式衡量的，因此可以很容易地将它们的规模进行比较，从而得出关于发展和增长的声明。国民收入统计将注意力集中在经济增长上，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加剧的不平等，尽管他们对贫困感兴趣。长期以来，智力学者们一直认为，科学实践可以构建对象，但这一传统的大多数工作都集中在自然科学和医学上。与自然科学不同，社会科学经常用行政数据来构建其对象，因此现有的信息已经被解释和分类。这项关于经济学家如何构建“经济”的调查应该会为社会科学如何塑造世界的过程提供更广泛的洞察力。博爱的影响为什么每一美元都应该一样计算，无论是用于治疗疾病、清理污染还是制造炸弹？这篇论文探讨了美国是如何确定这个问题的一个特定答案的，以及为什么学者和其他人仍在争论这个问题。在有关国内生产总值(GDP)衡量标准的争论背后，隐藏着关于应该重视什么的伦理问题，以及关于经济本身性质的根本性问题。

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.