Tiago Mata

University College London | UCL · Department of Science and Technology Studies

In the 1960s and 1970s, the social science associations (anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, and history) were faced by a string of academic freedom controversies. I review debates at association meetings and the reports and policy statements of committees on ethics and political discrimination. The ethics committees dealt with t...

Argument In the late 1960s, in the midst of campus unrest, a group of young economists calling themselves “radicals” challenged the boundaries of economics. In the radicals' cultural cartography, economic science and politics were represented as overlapping. These claims were scandalous because they were voiced from Harvard University, drawing on i...

The cultural authority of social science hinges on its public representation. In postwar United States of America, the business media were influential promoters of the appreciation of economics. This essay examines the work of a journalist and editor, Leonard S. Silk, and a magazine, Business Week, to reveal how trust in economics was established i...

The introductory essay to the HOPE supplement on “economics as news” argues why journalism is a deserving subject for research in the history of economics. The case rests on three claims. The first is that the study of journalism gives us a view of a distinct epistemological tradition, of news epistemology, that unsettles the standard convictions o...

John D. McDonald was a writer and editor best known for his work at Fortune magazine in the 1950s and 1960s and as the ghostwriter of the memoirs of Alfred P. Sloan. McDonald was also the first person to popularize game theory. In this article I argue that game theory played a key role in McDonald's transition from documentary writer to business jo...

Beginning in the 18th century, a turning point in labour history as work encountered an industrialising modernity, this book explores how different forms of work have been valued up to the present day. Focusing on the cultural, intellectual, social and political implications of wages, the chapters in this collection historicise the labour market, c...

The Cambridge Capital Controversy was one of the most significant debates in Twentieth Century economics. First published in 1972, this book provides an accessible reconstruction of the controversy with detailed discussion of the major points raised by its primary protagonists: Piero Sraffa and Joan Robinson on the post-Keynesian side (Cambridge, U...

The Cambridge Capital Controversy was one of the most significant debates in Twentieth Century economics. First published in 1972, this book provides an accessible reconstruction of the controversy with detailed discussion of the major points raised by its primary protagonists: Piero Sraffa and Joan Robinson on the post-Keynesian side (Cambridge, U...

The Cambridge Capital Controversy was one of the most significant debates in Twentieth Century economics. First published in 1972, this book provides an accessible reconstruction of the controversy with detailed discussion of the major points raised by its primary protagonists: Piero Sraffa and Joan Robinson on the post-Keynesian side (Cambridge, U...

In order to determine the rate of profits in capitalist society it is necessary, as we saw in Chapter 4, to introduce further factors from outside the production system itself. Certain economists – Kaldor, Joan Robinson, Pasinetti – have argued that the factors are the saving propensities associated with different classes of income-receivers in the...

The Cambridge Capital Controversy was one of the most significant debates in Twentieth Century economics. First published in 1972, this book provides an accessible reconstruction of the controversy with detailed discussion of the major points raised by its primary protagonists: Piero Sraffa and Joan Robinson on the post-Keynesian side (Cambridge, U...

The Cambridge Capital Controversy was one of the most significant debates in Twentieth Century economics. First published in 1972, this book provides an accessible reconstruction of the controversy with detailed discussion of the major points raised by its primary protagonists: Piero Sraffa and Joan Robinson on the post-Keynesian side (Cambridge, U...

The Cambridge Capital Controversy was one of the most significant debates in Twentieth Century economics. First published in 1972, this book provides an accessible reconstruction of the controversy with detailed discussion of the major points raised by its primary protagonists: Piero Sraffa and Joan Robinson on the post-Keynesian side (Cambridge, U...

The Cambridge Capital Controversy was one of the most significant debates in Twentieth Century economics. First published in 1972, this book provides an accessible reconstruction of the controversy with detailed discussion of the major points raised by its primary protagonists: Piero Sraffa and Joan Robinson on the post-Keynesian side (Cambridge, U...

The Cambridge Capital Controversy was one of the most significant debates in Twentieth Century economics. First published in 1972, this book provides an accessible reconstruction of the controversy with detailed discussion of the major points raised by its primary protagonists: Piero Sraffa and Joan Robinson on the post-Keynesian side (Cambridge, U...

Another offshoot of the criticisms of the use of the concept of malleable capital both in theoretical analysis and in the aggregate production function is the work on the social rate of return on investment, which is associated especially with Solow. His views are set out in the 1963 De Vries Lectures, Solow [1963a], in his contribution to the Dobb...

The Cambridge Capital Controversy was one of the most significant debates in Twentieth Century economics. First published in 1972, this book provides an accessible reconstruction of the controversy with detailed discussion of the major points raised by its primary protagonists: Piero Sraffa and Joan Robinson on the post-Keynesian side (Cambridge, U...

Review of “Recharting the History of Economic Thought” edited by Kevin Deane and Elisa Van Waeyenberge

The agencies of the government of the United States of America, such as the Food and Drug Administration or the Environmental Protection Agency, intervene in American society through the collection, processing, and diffusion of information. The Presidency of Barack Obama was notable for updating and redesigning the US government’s information infra...

This essay reflects on the life and career of Craufurd Goodwin as told in his own words. Topics discussed include his decision to become a historian of economics, his descriptions of his research interests and what drew him to them, and his views on the discipline of the history of economics. Craufurd’s attitude toward his lived experience reveals...

In my years as a student of Mary Morgan and later as her junior peer, I observed that one concept prompted her to react with caution and skepticism. That common notion was “influence.” In this chapter, I follow her cues to ask what are the legitimate grounds for claims of influence in historical explanation. Morgan’s writings have made us aware tha...

Discussions of historiography often exclude books published for a mass public. As a result, we have developed a skewed appreciation of who writes the history of economics, how it is written, and who reads it. In this essay I argue that learned and popular histories should be read as equals and that we ought to study both as objects in culture, fore...

Historians of economics are helping us understand how economic knowledge is made. In concert with trends from the sociology and history of science, historians meticulously examine the practices of economists. But as they have trained their attention to the scales and sites where those stories are told, historians have lost sight of the travels of k...

The 1930s transformed American capitalism. This article interrogates the political economy of two business magazines created at the start of the Great Depression. I argue that Business Week ’s and Fortune ’s signature approaches to reporting articulated an ideal conception of the manager. The early century conception saw the manager as engineer of...

In this essay, I argue that radical economics innovated in the communication of economic ideas, engendering new idioms and print formats to intervene in circuits of progressive activism. The essay mentions the pamphlet work of the Union for Radical Political Economics’ various public engagement projects of the early 1970s but at its heart is the 19...

In my years as a student of Mary Morgan and later as her junior peer, I observed that one concept prompted her to react with caution and skepticism. That common notion was “influence.” In this chapter, I follow her cues to ask what are the legitimate grounds for claims of influence in historical explanation. Morgan’s writings have made us aware tha...

This essay illuminates a neglected aspect of Friedrich Engels’s life: his work at his family’s textile firm, Ermen & Engels, in Manchester, the hub of the cotton industry in the mid-nineteenth century. We argue that Engels was a merchant and an intelligencer with a detailed, comprehensive understanding of products and the movements of goods, orders...

Goodwin Craufurd D. , Walter Lippmann: Public Economist (Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 424, $35. ISBN 978-0-67436-813-2. - Volume 39 Issue 2 - Tiago Mata

Szenberg Michael and Ramrattan Lall B., eds., Eminent Economists II: Their Life and Work Philosophies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 486, $37.95. ISBN 978-1-107-65636-9. - Volume 38 Issue 1 - Tiago Mata

Twitter: how is it used by academics to advance science in different research fields? This handbook published by EMLYON Press gathers recent studies where data collected from Twitter helped explore fascinating questions in linguistics, marketing, urban studies and beyond. It comprises 13 chapters written by an international group of academics wh...

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Public policy requires public support, which in turn implies a need to enable the public not just to understand policy but also to be engaged in its development. Where complex science and technology issues are involved in policy making, this takes time, so it is important to identify emerging issues of this type and prepare engagement plans. In our...

The essays in this volume examine the economist as public intellectual. Rather than assessing the changing status of the public intellectual in culture or attempting to define the identity of the public intellectual, our approach is to study the public interventions of economists, that is, the encounters between economists and their publics. In the...

Research in the social sciences received generous patronage in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Research was widely perceived as providing solutions to emerging social problems. That generosity came under increased contest in the late 1970s. Although these trends held true for all of the social sciences, this essay explores the various ways by which...

Economists are not memorialized in monuments. Wynne Godley is the exception, his likeness is cast in bronze upon Coventry Cathedral as archangel Michael (‘St Michael’s Victory over the Devil’, 1958) in a sculpture by his father-in-law Jacob Epstein. On his passing, Godley was remembered in obituaries in the major British broadsheets, that recalled...

GearyDaniel, Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 296, $31.95. ISBN 978-0-520-25836-5. - Volume 33 Issue 3 - Tiago Mata

Among American news magazines Newsweek holds the distinction of having hosted some of the most authoritative interpretation of economic events. Its cast of columnists included two of the most acclaimed academic economists and some of the most widely read business journalists of the late twentieth century. The purpose of this paper is to examine the...

Research in the social sciences received generous patronage in the late 1960s and early 1970s when social problems were particularly severe and when social sciences were seen as creating social and economic benefits. That generosity ended in the late 1970s. This essay explores the various ways by which economists reacted to and resisted the patrona...

Robert Solow's "Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function" (1957) has had an enduring influence on macroeconomics. In this article, we examine the history of fluctuations in growth theory through the story of the "Solow residual" as a "black box." We show that after Solow's seminal contribution, the "residual" became a reproducible obj...

In August 15, 1971, President Nixon announced the unilateral suspension of the convertibility of the dollar into gold, a foundation of the world monetary system since the Second World War. The media and economic experts were caught by surprise, neither could foresee the immediate consequences of the decision or what would be the architecture of the...

The history of dissent in economics has thus far been subject to scant interest. The existing scholarship, authored by dissenters probing their own past, has failed to address the crucial questions of how dissent emerged and rooted itself. This study is about two dissenting communities, Radical Political Economics and Post Keynesian Economics. I re...

for Seminario do Departamento de Economia, ISEG, 17 de Marco 2004 Intellectual controversies reshape theoretical space. As opposing sides battle over principles, they redraw the boundaries of the groups that inhabit the discipline - the "us" and the "them". As opposing sides battle over the history of the discipline, they place the "us" and the "th...