Inventing the Economy Or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the GDP.

Abstract

What is the economy? Recent scholarship has demonstrated that “the economy” is a relatively new feature of economic discourse. Before 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 offers a “formation story” for the economy, tracing the messy assemblages that constituted the economy and the consequences that flowed from the particular shape it took. Using a variety of historical data, I argue that the production of official, routine, timely macroeconomic statistics transformed the fuzzy conceptual space of “economic life” into a sociotechnical object, “the economy” in the 1930s and 1940s. I focus especially on national income statistics (GNP, GDP) as a key practice that enacted the economy as an object with a precisely-defined boundary and size.

This dissertation contributes to research on the performativity of economics and the political power of economic expertise. I show how economists constructed “regimes of perceptibility” that focused attention on economic growth, and away from income and wealth inequality, which contributed to academics and policymakers overlooking increasing inequality. Similarly, macroeconomic statistics ignored unpaid housework, and thus defined much of women’s labor outside of the economy. The macroeconomic regime of perceptibility made visible small economic fluctuations that were invisible in earlier eras. This visibility made possible a new political rationality, “managing the economy,” which allowed policymakers to act on economic aggregates rather than individual industries or markets, while simultaneously obligating them to account for small deviations from precisely defined goals. Economic experts thus reshaped political dynamics by constructing new objects of governance and, in so doing, reshaping the capacities and obligations of the state.