2 A recurring budget deficit, which topped 12 billion in 1959, impeded much-needed defense, education and welfare expenditures. The facts are well known: Eisenhower’s legacy was a sluggish decade, with growth stuck at 2,5% per year and unemployment at 8%. Johnson to implement a massive income and business tax cut. Most famously, he managed to convince Kennedy and Lyndon B. He was instrumental in putting a War on Poverty on the presidential agenda (Haveman et al., 2015) and in turning human capital theory into an argument in favor of federal funding for education (Holden and Biddle, 2018). 3 The extent to which the tax cut fueled this period of prosperity, and subsequent imbalances, is sti (.)Ģ That Heller was successful in influencing economic policies is quite uncontroversial.2 This quick chronology is based on Bernstein (2001, chapter 3).Je conclue que cette vision très ‘personnalisée’ du conseil aux décideurs contraste avec les modes technocratiques et anonymes par lesquels les économistes ont plus récemment influencé les politiques publiques. J’étudie enfin la place qu’attribuait Heller à la science et à la rhétorique dans les interactions entre les conseillers économiques et leurs publics, l’inévitable dimension normative et l’importance de rechercher et de rendre visible un consensus disciplinaire en économie. Pour ce faire, j’analyse la vision de l’économiste comme éducateur qui se dégage de ses « mémos », et j’explique que ce n’est pas seulement la recherche économique qui nourrissait les débats de politique publique, mais que sa volonté de convaincre le président conduisit Heller à superviser de nouvelles recherches macroéconomiques. Cet article documente la manière dont Heller a transformé son expertise économique en politique publique, et les leçons qu’il en a tirées sur les interactions entre experts et décideurs. Kennedy, de mettre en place une réduction d’impôts massive dans les années 1960. L’un des exemples les plus donnés pour illustrer l’influence des économistes sur la politique publique est celui de Walter Heller, président du Council of Economic Advisors, qui réussit à convaincre J.F. I conclude that the institutional and personal context of the 1960s entailed a highly personalized vision of advising, at odd with the tool-based vision underlying the subsequent “economicization” of economic policy in the following decades. I then analyze how Heller “theorized” his and his colleagues’ practices in the late 1960s, in particular what stance he took on three contentious issues: the place of science and persuasion in advisers’ interaction with their publics, how much normative values are involved in advising, and whether advising should rely on a disciplinary consensus. The underlying emphasis, thus, is not just on how economic knowledge affects public reason, but also how public reason shapes economics science. I show that Heller considered himself as “an educator of presidents,” but that in educating, he was also led to commission some academic work that altered the science he was trying to disseminate. The paper first zooms onto the historical “footsteps” of Heller’s CEA tenure: his memos. The purpose of this paper is to reinvestigate how Heller channeled his expertise into policy, and what lessons he drew on how economists should engage with public reason. Walter Heller’s success in convincing JF Kennedy to pass a “tax cut” when he was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in the 1960s is often heralded as the poster child for economists’ policy influence, yet also sometimes seen as a lost golden age.
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