A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America

The 20th-century saga of the economics profession in America is the story of how a humble quest to understand the "wealth of nations" became imbued with immense public prestige and finally, a strangely withered public purpose. Michael Bernstein portrays a profession that has ended up repudiating the state that nurtured it, ignoring distributive justice, and disproportionately privileging private desires in the study of economic life. Intellectual introversion has robbed it, he contends, of the very public influence it coveted and cultivated for so long. With wit and irony he examines how a community of experts now identified with uncritical celebration of "free market" virtues was itself shaped, dramatically so, by government and collective action. In arresting and provocative detail, Bernstein describes economists' fitful efforts to sway a state apparatus where values and goals could seldom remain separate from means and technique, and how their vocation was ultimately humbled by government itself. Replete with novel research findings, his worik also analyzes the historical peculiarities that led the profession to a key role in the contemporary backlash agains federal initiatives

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations ix A Note on the Notes xi Prologue. Being Ignored 1 Introduction. Professional Expertise as a Historical Problem 7 1. Shaping an Authoritative Community 15 2. Prospects, Puzzles, and Predicaments 40 3. The Mobilization of Resources and Vice Versa 73 4. On Behalf of the National Security State 91 5. Statecraft and Its Retainers 115 6. Statecraft and Its Discontents 148 Epilogue. Being Ignored (Reprise) 185 Notes 195 Bibliography and Reference Abbreviations 291 Acknowledgments 343 Index 347

About the Author :
Michael A. Bernstein is Professor of History and Associated Faculty-Member in Economics at the University of California. San Diego. He is the author of The Great Depression Delayed Recovery and Economic Change in America, 1929-1939, and coeditor of Understanding American Economic Decline.

Review :
Michael A. Bernstein has produced a first-rate analysis of the professionalization of social science. His book is not only a well-informed history of the American economics profession but also an insightful analysis of its relationship with government and a philippic against what Bernstein sees as the profession's recent self-prostitution. -- Thomas K. McCraw Journal of American History Bernstein details a largely unknown and even unsuspected history of how our professional associations and journals strove from the beginning to engage the important questions, and of how they in the end lost the ability to do so. -- James K. Galbraith The Washington Monthly This book is an impressive achievement. -- William J. Barber EH.Net