History of Economics: Ideas, Policy and Performativity

Rather than a traditional workshop where people present existing papers, we are seeking short contributions of around 10 minutes that provide insight into how economic ideas change the way the economy works (see workshop rationale below for examples). We envision these being case studies from people’s research, which may be on an entirely different topic. The idea is to juxtapose many cases from different contexts and time periods to spark discussion and debate about how ideas shape and are shaped by the economy. We welcome proposals from faculty and PhD students alike.

To submit a proposal for a case or register your attendance, please use the following link: https://forms.gle/yZER9TyTz7qpU1uh7

In 2013, Mary created a new graduate course called History of Economics: Ideas, Policy, and Performativity, upon which the book project will be based. The course asks: “If you want to change the way an economy works, how do you do it?”; or to use the more technical language of the course title: how do ideas become ‘performative’ to make an economy behave more like the ideas economists have about how it should work?

The traditional and simple answer is: economists have ideas, they are translated into policy, and then put into practice. This answer is naive on many fronts, underestimating the immense difficulties of that final step in overcoming the challenges of economic events and political changes of the 20^th century. Major wars, great depressions, the development agendas of new states, let alone revolutions into socialist economies offer the major examples used in the course in order to analyse and understand the problems involved. But we also look at more measured but major shifts such as the formation of a ‘welfare state’ (the subject of Mary’s public lecture for the Department in 2023), for as society demands action, then much else has to change concurrently. All these major shifts involve not only changes in economic processes and institutions but also cognitive and behavioural changes in peoples’ economic lives.

During these 20thC changes in economic history, economists evolved new ideas about how economies work, new ways of describing the economy, and of measuring the economy. These are part of the course, but we also use ideas from political history, from sociology and accounting, from history of statistics, and from philosophy of science to understand how these major changes in economic life are created. Thus the course is an eclectic mix of social scientific approaches to the main problem, and intriguing primary case-work materials, to answer that question of how to get the economy to change behaviour.

Over the years, the course has gained from many collaborations - particularly with the Department’s Teaching Fellows who brought their own backgrounds and cases to the course: Helen Yaffe, Guillaume Yon, Andrès Guiot-Isaac, and Federico D’Onofrio. In addition many of the PhD students and MSC students who have taken the course have fed ideas and cases into the mix and even contributed archive materials. The ideas of the course have also gained immensely from interactions with academics across the School.

The workshop hopes to attract new cases from economic history and new thoughts about analysing the processes of change and to engage a wide range of scholars in a discussion of these issues.

A book of abstracts is available here.

9.15am: Welcome and Introduction – Eric Schneider

9.30am: Session 1 Institutions from Below
Chair: t.b.c
Tirthankar Roy, LSE "Institutions" before the word: state building in 18th‑century Bengal
Alexander Neuber, University of Barcelona Economists as advisory agents in the transition from socialism in Poland and Russia - reflections on performativity, institutions, norms, and some cautionary tales on hubris
Matthew Benson-Strohmayer, LSE Performing the fiscal state with and without the state: economic ideas and civic enactment in Sudan, 1953-2023

10.15am: Session 2 Development Ideas
Chair: t.b.c
Joan Roses, LSE How economic ideas shape the economy: the case of Krugman's New Economic Geography
Helen Yaffe, University of Glasgow The performativity of Che Guevara's revolutionary praxis
Gareth Austin, University of Cambridge Economic ideas mattered: economic theory and policy advice in Ghanaian government decision-making, 1951-86

11.00am: Coffee

11.30am: Session 3 Creating Institutions
Chair: t.b.c
Sabina Leonelli, Technical University of Munich The European Green Deal and the Climate Pact: successes and failures of economic strategies for environmental intelligence
Cléo Chassonnery-Zaїgouche, LSE Almost worth it: the rise and fall of comparable worth in American policy
Leigh Gardner, LSE Reconstruction in Africa? Exporting ideas about development from the US South

12.15pm: Session 4 Cultures of the Self
Chair: t.b.c
Gerardo Serra, University of Manchester Wave of mutilation: Ghanaian film posters and the visual economy of late capitalism
Melanie Xue, LSE History as evolution: the case of China
Harro Maas, University of Lausanne Soul crafting and the making of economic man

1.00pm: Lunch

2.00pm: Session 5 Numbers
Chair: t.b.c
Aashish Velkar, University of Manchester Standards and policy
Tiago Mata, University College London What makes a public number?
Eric Schneider, LSE The rise of child stunting as an indicator of malnutrition

2.45pm: Session 6 Economic Technologies
Chair: t.b.c
Peter Rodenburg, University of Amsterdam Delft efficiency engineers and technical economics
Marcel Boumans, Utrecht University Shaping the economy
Gerben Bakker, LSE Growth accounting before Solow and possible impacts on economic policy

3.30pm: Coffee

4.00pm: Session 7 Money Policy
Chair: t.b.c
John Gent, Independent "If you want to change the way an economy works, how do you do it?" - Change the incentives!
Aristeidis Grivokostopoulos, LSE Between civilisation and constitution: Greek Parliamentary debates on Gold Standard adoption, 1875–1885.

4.30pm: Session 8 Market Technologies
Chair: t.b.c
Guillaume Yon, RWTH Aachen University Economic knowledge and computer-automated transactions: the case of US Airlines in the 1990s
Joe Lane, Henley Business School Did patent policy change behaviour?
Marcia Balisciano, LSE alumna Better business, better economies? The rise of corporate sustainability and its 21st century economic impact

5.15pm: Reflections – Mary and Participants

6.30pm: Reception, Shaw Library