Lunchtime Seminar - Tiago Mata - Arise ye prisoners of taxation

Arise ye prisoners of taxation -  the writings of Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson at Newsweek, 1966-1984.

Since the 1960s a small number of academic economists has enjoyed celebrity status in the US media. Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman were exemplar specimens of the kind. From 1966 to 1984 they were columnists at Newsweek. Samuelson and Friedman became newsworthy by forecasting the outcomes of competing policy programs and imagining a horizon of prosperity. Faced by the social upheavals and the stagflation of the 1970s their writing turned from prediction and advice to indictments of government failure. During the tax revolts of 1976-78 Friedman claimed membership to an imagined community of taxpayers reclaiming their wealth from the state.  The study of the Newsweek columns shows the work of the imagination in the public interventions of economists, and that celebrity economists have preserved the privilege of public attention by reimagining the polity and their place within it.  

About the Speaker

Tiago Mata is a Lecturer at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College, London.  He has published on the history and sociology of dissent in economics, academic freedom and the patronage of social science.  Mata studies Economics at the Technical University of Lisbon and the University of Cambridge and has a PhD in Economic History from the London School of Economics.  Since 2012 he heads a research team studying the practices and genres of economic journalism in UK, USA, France, Brazil and Argentina since 1945.