Aims of the lecture

• 1. To introduce some popular twentieth-century writers on economics.

• 2. To place these economists in the context of economists’ involvement in public life more broadly.

• 3. To show how the role of economists in public discourse has changed during the twentieth century.

Note that there is considerable potential overlap between this lecture and lectures 23 and 24 in that, in democracies, there are connections between public discourse and the making of economic policy.

Bibliography

T. Mata and S. G. Medema (eds), The Economist as Public Intellectual, annual supplement to History of Political Economy 45 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). This volume contains an introduction that offers a framework for thinking about the role of economists in public life and a series of case studies. The introduction contains an extensive bibliography to which readers should turn to find more elaborate discussions of the issues discussed here.

C. D. W. Goodwin’s Walter Lippmann: Public Economist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013) gives an account of the economist who was, with little doubt, the leading journalist and interpreter of economics in the United States for much of the twentieth century.

R. Parker’s John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2005) is an intellectual biography of the economist, political adviser and public figure who was probably the most well-known economist in the 1950s and 1960s.

Lecture summary

Popular economics

Economics has always had its popularizers, but in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as economics became a specialized academic discipline, and a fortiori as it became more mathematical, the need for popular interpretations increased. Though the boundaries between them are very blurred, it can be useful to distinguish between three types of popular writing. Some popular writers translated academic work into material that non-specialists could understand. This covers both textbook writers, simplifying the subject for students, and writers who simplify in order to reach any interested reader. There are also economists who, though having good academic credentials, choose to develop some of their ideas in works that can be read by the general public.