Economic Policy Advice and the Press: The Case of Late 19th-Century Britain
Type
conference lecture
Date Issued
2023-09
Author(s)
Abstract
The 2007 financial crisis brought forward the powerful position of economists as experts, and the role of public opinion and media in the debates surrounding economic policy advice. The rise and organization of economic expertise has been largely studied from the 1900s on, but its perception and legitimacy has been rationalized and problematized by the public, via popular media, before the modern institutionalization of technocratic financial and monetary advice (Flandreau, 2003; Fourcade, 2009). In this presentation, I explore the history of the role of newspapers in the dissemination, legitimization, and organization of economic policy advice in the late Victorian British era (1870-1900). This period is particularly interesting for three main reasons: (1) the rise of the modern state and its growing reliance on scientific knowledge, (2) the academic institutionalization of the economic discipline, (3) and the development of new institutions designed to collect, curate, and assess information, such as mass press. Indeed, by the late 19th century, British newspapers went from being a source of information to the political and social elite to constituting the main reading of the wider public. I use digital archives of regional and local Victorian British newspapers (e.g. The Economist, The Times, The Telegraph, The Scotsman) to qualitatively study the discourses related to economic policy advice and figures of economic expertise. Based on primary material and literature on scientific knowledge production and media studies (Jasanoff, 1990; Daston and Galison, 2007; Conboy, 2002), I argue that, in this context, Victorian newspapers had a dual role: they reported but also created political discourses on expert economic advice. As such, I show that they played a key role in the articulation of the growing force of public opinion in relation to economic expertise at a time when the practice of economic policy advice started to become institutionalized.
Language
English
Event Title
Swiss Association for the Studies of Science, Technology & Society (STS-CH) 2023 Conference 'Science, Expertise and other Modes of Knowledge: Trends, Patterns, and Prospects'