Creating Control Systems: Edwin F. Gay and the Central Bureau of Planning and Statistics, 1917–1919

Cuff, Robert D.

doi:10.2307/3116041

Cited by 12 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Gay was a champion of Taylorism who once described scientific management as "the most important advance in industry since the introduction of the factory system and power machinery." 17 Gay and other economists, notably his friend Wesley Clair Mitchell, who ultimately directed the WIB's Price Division, put their scientific management ideas into government practice, first, by gathering and systematizing economic information (Cuff 1989). Mitchell's Price Division, for example, produced an immense study of American wholesale prices, data crucial for directing wartime production from Washington.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Progressive Era Origins of the Regulatory State and the Economist as Expert

Leonard

2015

History of Political Economy

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American economics established its scientific and political authority during the turbulent economic times of the long Progressive Era, 1885 to 1918. The rise of American economics is a tale with three acts. In the first act, a small band of progressive economists, many of them Protestant evangelicals on a self-appointed mission to redeem America, transformed the nature and practice of their own enterprise. From 1880 to 1900, both fostering and benefiting from a transformation of American higher education, the progressive economists established economics as a university discipline, transforming American political economy from a species of amateur, public-intellectual discourse into a professional, expert, scientific discipline-economics. In the second act, the upstart economists, writing with the scientific authority of their new professorial chairs, helped convince Americans and their political leaders that laissez-faire was doubly wrong, both economically outmoded and ethically stunted. Industrial capitalism, progressive economists said, created profound social conflicts, operated wastefully, and distributed its copious fruits unjustly. Moreover, the new economy History of Political Economy 47 (annual suppl.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Progressive Era Origins of the Regulatory State and the Economist as Expert

Leonard

2015

History of Political Economy

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“…The system was used for maximizing the industrial system's production capacity by balancing resource use for mobilization. This task required price controls, and it was Mitchell who produced price statistics for this purpose (Cuff 1989).…”

Section: The Birth Of "The Economy" As An Imbalanced System Of Flowsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nominal (Im)Balances of the National Economy: The Construction of the National Income and Products Accounts System as a Macroeconomic Infrastructure

Ozgode¹

2019

Preprint

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Scholars working on the history of economics and economic governance assume national income accounting emerged naturally out of Keynesian 8 concerns with economic growth and wartime needs. This paper providesan alternative and more complex genealogy, arguing instead that income accounting was born out of a governmental project, implemented by institutionalist economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) during the interwar period, to manage “the business cycle.” Bridging the literatures on the history of economic policymaking of the interwar period and the postwar triumph of “American Keynesianism,” it shows that institutionalists developed income accounting as a knowledge infrastructure to monitor inter-sectoral imbalances the generated cyclical fluctuations. Called the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) System, this infrastructure constructed “the economy” as a composite statistical object, composed of many disparate, non-fungible substantive elements that could not have been otherwise patched into a coherent whole. Wrapping these elements into the veil of money, the NIPA System became the interface through which policymakers intervened in intersectoral imbalances at the level of monetary flows with fiscal tools.

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“…One example oftheir contribution was the link forged between Dennison, Edwin Gay, and Mitchell. With America's entry into the hostilities Mitchell and Dennison worked under Gay at the Central Bureau of Planning and Statistics, this being a body that was charged with amassing and interpreting economic data from all branches of government and that reported directly to the executive (Cuff 1989;Bruce 1995).…”

Section: Managers Workers Social Scientists and Warmentioning

confidence: 99%