Tiago Mata

It promises to “discover your position in the political landscape for the 2009 European Parliament Elections.” It is Eu Profiler. My result puts me far to the left, and sitting on the fence about all things European (picture is me in the Portuguese “landscape”). The party in Europe I am closest to is the Piratpartiet of Sweden. And by reading their program online it seems a pretty nice match.

There is something unseemly about this survey. I makes political choices into an algorithm, of separable questions with individual weights. It makes party positions into discrete data points on a Cartesian axis. History personal and national is forgotten for the sake of the program. Charisma, trust, and imagination are not the axis. All that is exciting and humane about politics is expelled.

I won’t follow the advice and emigrate to Sweden to cast my vote. I doubt anyone will. Disciplinary projects like this, that want to shape reason and emotion are common. But their coming to existence doesn’t mean they are effective.

I hear Eric Alterman, blogger, professor, book author, in a podcast from the Woodrow Wilson School on the “The Future of News”. The session was roughly devoted to the economics of print, although very little of that go mentioned. There was on interesting passing remark by Alterman, that today’s media is mostly opinion, in loose paraphrase, to “provide context to the news.” News is everywhere, diffuse, instantaneous, and repeated in the print media, so the new journalist ventures mainly online focus on “context.”

Context is thrown back and forth in academic and semi-academic settings as a good thing. But the more it gets invoked the less I understand what it refers to.

Perhaps the most celebrated quote by an economist, and a clear favorite of economic journalists, is John Maynard Keynes’ warning:

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

Keynes suggested a conspiracy of intellectuals, insidiously determining the affairs of men. Economic journalists take this warning seriously. They are the most vigilant observers of the border crossings between academia, government and business.

I am interested in how economic journalists work. How do they make economics newsworthy? How do they interact with their sources?

I am interested in how the public reads economic news. What is economic news good for? and for whom?

I am researching the life and work of economic journalist Leonard S. Silk.

Silk joined Business Week in 1954. After a short spell as a staff writer, Silk became editor of the “Economics” section of the magazine. In 1959 he became Senior Editor and in 1967, editor of the magazines’s editorial page.

He was also at the New York Times from 1970 to 1992.

I began my research in the history of social science by studying for a PhD degree at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History. Under the supervision of Professor Mary S. Morgan, I investigated the emergence and early history of two groups of dissenting economists – Post Keynesians and Radical Political Economists. My thesis title was: Dissent In Economics: Making Radical Political Economics and Post Keynesian Economics, 1960-1980.

On conclusion of my degree in 2005, I took a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London. There, I contrasted my findings with the literature on dissent in natural science. I have found striking similarities in dissenters’ construction of identity and difference. This cultural practice is often called in science studies: “boundary work.”

I am now preparing my findings for book publication. I am researching the files of the Students for Democratic Society, examining their pamphlets and newsletters. I am also interested in the secondary literature on radical thought in others disciplines, such as history, sociology and education.

Migrations and Boundary Work: Harvard, Radical Economists, and the Committee on Political Discrimination in Science in Context, 2009, 22(1): 115-143.

Argument
In the late 1960s, in the midst of campus unrest, a group of young economists calling themselves “radicals” challenged the boundar ies 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 its author ity. With radicals’ claims the subject of increasing media attention, the economics mainstream sought to re-assert the longstanding cultural map of economic science, where objectivity and advocacy were distinguishable. The resolution of the contest of credibility came with a string of cases of dismissals and denial of tenure for radicals. The Amer ican Economic Association’s investigations of these cases, imposing the conventional cultural map, concluded that personnel decisions had not been politically motivated. Radicals were forced to migrate from the elite institutions from which they had emerged to less prestigious ones. “Place” became a marker of their
marginalization within the profession.

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I’ve been making notes on the media debates about the economic (formerly financial, and credit) crisis. My plan was to write down in notecards: themes, characters, positions, and narratives. Then cover a large table with the color coded cards. Shuffle them. And rearrange them in sequences and distances, taking photographs of each setting. With no pretension of making an art installation. This is my native, Ven diagram, way of thinking through the thematic patterns of popular discourse.

Regrettably I am too slow. My speed impairment is expressed in my street running, my pool swimming, my football striker instincts and my paper writing. Worse still, I don’t usually win games: chess, checkers, Go, Unreal Tournament, Fifa 07. Picking last week’s New Yorker I notice how I lost another race. I feel cheated, my notecards stacked mercilessly into one single paragraph.

Please take a deep breath, and read the following:

This crisis is the culmination of events and trends reaching back, depending on your perspective, four, seven, seventeen, twenty-two, twenty-seven, thirty-eight, sixty-five, or a hundred and two years. (…) The causes are technological, mathematical, cultural, demographic, financial, economic, behavioral, legal, and political. Among the dozens of contributors and culprits, real or perceived, are the personal computer, the abandonment of the gold standard, the abandonment of Glass-Steagall, the end of fixed commissions, the rating agencies, mortgage-backed securities, securitization in general, credit derivatives, credit-default swaps, Wall Street partnerships going public, the League of Nations, Bretton Woods, Basel II, CNBC, the S.E.C., disintermediation, overcompensation, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, Phil Gramm and Jim Leach, Alan Greenspan, black swans, red tape, deregulation, outdated regulation, lax enforcement, government pressure to lower lending standards, predatory lending, mark-to-market accounting, hedge funds, private-equity firms, modern finance theory, risk models, “quants,” corporate boards, the baby boomers, flat-screen televisions, and an indulgent, undereducated populace.

(Friends, family, and fans, worry not, I will pull through and have already a new paper idea: to expose the New Yorker as meta-journalism.)

The Role of Life Histories in Writing the History of Heterodox Economics: Identity and Difference in Radical Economics with Frederic S. Lee, in History of Political Economy, 2007, 39(supplement): 154-171.

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